Spinnaker, an open-source project that lets companies improve the speed and stability of their application deployment processes, reached the 1.0 release milestone Tuesday.
Google announced the 1.0 release of Spinnaker, which was originally developed inside Netflix and enhanced by Google and a few other companies. The software is used by companies like Target and Cloudera to enable continuous delivery, a modern software development concept that holds application updates should be delivered when they are ready, instead of on a fixed schedule.
Spinnaker is just another one of the open-source projects that are at the heart of modern cloud computing, and the release of a 1.0 version helps nudge companies who are a little less daring with their production environments to take another look. There doesn’t appear to be a commercially supported version of Spinnaker at the moment, although Red Hat offers something similar with its Ansible project.
Spinnaker is probably still best for early adopters, but continuous delivery in general is one of the many advances in software development enabled by cloud computing that will likely be an industry best practice in a few years.
In an interesting move, Google took pains to highlight the cross-platform nature of Spinnaker, noting that will run across several different cloud providers and application development environments. Google is chasing cloud workloads that tend to go to Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, and noted “whether you’re releasing to multiple clouds or preventing vendor lock-in, Spinnaker helps you deploy your application based on what’s best for your business.”
AWS lets users take advantage of continuous delivery principles through its AWS CodeDeploy feature, another one of those AWS features that give its customers additional functionality while encouraging them to modify their code inside AWS.
