Netflix Released Spinnaker; Reducing Dependency to Amazon

Netflix released its Continuous Delivery platform as an open source software this Monday. Spinnaker, is a replacement of their old software development tools, Asgard. With Spinnacle, Netflix can launch their streaming video service on multi-cloud platform. Previously, Netflix was fully reliance on Amazon Web Service to deliver its service.

Netflix is known as a video streaming giant. It has been in a long partnership with Amazon Web Service (AWS) as its cloud provider. With the release of its Spinnaker, Netflix seems to want to increase its resilience by multi-sourcing with other cloud service providers. Spinnaker is a tool to manage cloud resources, and to continuously deploying its latest software code to machine running in cloud. Now, Spinnaker allow Netflix to deploy their service over multiple cloud service, from Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

According to Forbes, Spinnaker supports deployment to AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Pivotal Cloud Foundry today, with support for Microsoft Azure "actively underway." Forbes sees that now Netflix is able to source its vital service from multiple parties, hence put competitive pressure on AWS. It also serves Netflix interest to avoid AWS become de-facto monopoly that can dictate terms. Netflix can improve services and achieve price reduction through AWS competition with Azure, Google, and Pivotal. Its Spinnaker also provides Netflix with a larger, more robust ecosystem for its services.

Spinnaker enables engineers to deploy software simultaneously across multiple cloud providers. ZDNet reported that Spinnaker has already been in development for more than a year to replace Asgard. Andy Glover, manager of delivery engineering at Netflix said,"Spinnaker facilitates the creation of pipelines that represent a delivery process that can begin with the creation of some deployable asset (such as an machine image, Jar file, or Docker image) and end with a deployment,"

Continuous Delivery (CD) is a software development and deployment model that emphasize on rapid deployment and delivery. It uses mechanism that mimics the conveyor belt in manufacturing and delivering software. In order to achieve Continuous Delivery, it requires automated testing and deployment. That is exactly what Spinnaker provide in order to deploy simultaneously to multiple cloud platform, considering the increasing complexities of cloud platform.

Wired noted complexities in cloud platform environment. It said how the world of cloud computing is a complicated one, both technically and politically. With Spinnaker, Netflix showed just how complex-and how intriguing-this new world order can be.

Netflix new deployment tool, Spinnaker enables its delivery of service across multiple cloud platform. Thus, increasing service resilience and reducing reliance to a single cloyd provider. As for now, Spinnaker support continuous deployment to AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and soon will also support Microsoft Azure.