Spinnaker, an open-source tool designed for testing and rolling out software updates in the cloud has been released by Netflix.
The tool which took a year to build is based on its internal toolkit that aids the speedy deployment of new features from deployment through testing and production.
The key benefits of the tool are that it helps developers to make software changes across multiple hosting platforms with speed. Not only can it do that, but it is also compatible with major cloud platforms.
Amazon’s AWS, Google Cloud and Pivotal’s CloudFoundry are all compatible, with plans afoot for support for Microsoft’s Azure and containers.
Support for the project has come from Microsoft, Google and Pivotal in addition to Netflix.
The idea behind this appears to be that of multi-sourcing, so that developers and businesses aren’t at risk from being tied in with one cloud provider. In-case of an outage you can just choose another.
This minimises the impact of an outage and helps to make the tool more resilient.
