wtf is clouddriver?

Clouddriver is the part of Spinnaker that connects to your cloud infrastructure, whether that's AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, CloudFoundry, or other providers. Think of it as a translator: when you want to deploy an application, scale up servers, or check what's running in the cloud, Clouddriver handles the actual communication with your cloud provider on your behalf. Most deployment tools work with one cloud at a time. Spinnaker is built to manage multiple clouds simultaneously, and Clouddriver is the service that makes this possible. It reads information from your cloud accounts (like what instances are running or what load balancers exist) and writes changes back (like launching new servers or updating configurations). This lets you orchestrate deployments across different cloud providers from a single interface, rather than switching between AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure dashboards separately. If you're building deployment pipelines, managing infrastructure across multiple clouds, or want a centralized control plane for your cloud resources, Clouddriver is the backbone that makes it work. A team might use it to automatically deploy the same application to AWS for redundancy and Google Cloud for cost optimization, all through one Spinnaker interface. Operations and DevOps engineers benefit most, since it removes friction when managing infrastructure sprawl. The repository is a Java-based service designed to be part of the larger Spinnaker platform. The README includes setup guidance for developers using IntelliJ, notes about code generation tools the project uses, and instructions for debugging. If you're contributing to or customizing it, the main entry points are configuring your development environment and running it locally with debugging enabled on port 7102.