An open source tool for automated
deployment monitoring has been launched by Netflix and Google to help other
companies modernise their practices.
Kayenta is a form of ‘canary analysis’ tool which aims to
detect problems before they become a serious issue. Fun fact: Coal miners would
once take canaries in cages down into the pits as they are especially sensitive
to dangerous gases — if a canary dies, the miners knew to make a quick exit.
Netflix first began development on Kayenta for internal use
but decided it wanted to release it to a wider audience. Much of the code was
specific to Netflix, so the company enlisted the help of Google to rewrite
parts of it and make it modular. The teams spent about a year undertaking this
effort.
Greg Burrell, Senior Reliability Engineer at Netflix, says:
"Automated canary analysis is an essential part of
the production deployment process at Netflix and we are excited to release
Kayenta. Our partnership with Google on Kayenta has yielded a flexible
architecture that helps perform automated canary analysis on a wide range of
deployment scenarios such as application, configuration and data changes.
By the end of the year, we expect Kayenta to be making
thousands of canary judgments per day. Spinnaker and Kayenta are fast,
reliable, and easy-to-use tools that minimise deployment
risk while allowing high velocity at scale."
The result is a flexible tool which is going to help businesses
of all sizes improve their deployments. Big companies have the budgets and
expertise to build a bespoke solution for their needs, but this still takes a
lot of time.
Tom Feiner, Systems Operations Engineer at Waze, comments:
“Canary analysis along with Spinnaker deployment
pipelines enables us to automatically identify bad deployments. With 1000+
pipelines running in production, any form of human intervention as a part of
canary analysis can be a huge blocker to our continuous delivery efforts.
Automated canary deployment, as enabled by Kayenta, has
allowed our team to increase development velocity by detecting anomalies
faster. Additionally, being open source, standardizing on Kayenta helps reduce
the risk of vendor lock-in.”
In today’s world, companies know they need to move fast.
Startups typically perform better here because they are more nimble. Continuous
software development practices break
larger projects into smaller parts so directions can be changed more quickly if
needed, but deployments can often be rushed and face problems.
Kayenta, like other canary analysis tools, will run checks
to quickly ensure no problems will be faced when an upgrade is fully deployed.
The system is objective and immune to any human error and potential bias
involved with a manual canary test.
Source: developer-tech
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