Netflix Open Sources Continuous Delivery Platform for Multi-Cloud Environments

In order to meet the challenges of continuous delivery across multiple clouds, Netflix began developing Spinnaker a year ago, and the company announced Monday that it has released the Continuous Delivery platform to GitHub. Spinnaker creates pipelines from creation to deployment, and is designed to be easily extended to deliver cluster management and deployment across different cloud deployment models, Netflix said.

The importance for Netflix of maintaining Continuous Delivery across multiple clouds was demonstrated in September, when it was affected by an AWS outage.

Spinnaker replaces AWS deployment automation tool Asgard, and is intended to benefit development with operational resilience, easy configuration, maintenance, and extension, and programmatic configuration and execution via a consistent API, according to the company. It also provides a global view of the environments an application passes through, and repeatable automated deployments, plus the benefits of Asgard, without migration.

Clusters can be deployed and managed simultaneously across AWS and Google Cloud Platform with Spinnaker, which also supports Cloud Foundry, and will add support for Azure in the near future, according to Netflix.

Spinnaker pipelines can be triggered by completing a Jenkins Job, manually, with a cron expression, or via other pipelines. It comes with a number of stages, which can be run serially or in parallel. Spinnaker can be used to manage server groups, load balancers, and security groups.

Netflix is engaging the developer community through a Slack channel andStackOverflow, and the GitHub package includes installation instructions and pre-existing images from Kenzan and Google.