Google and Netflix have announced a new project designed to reduce the risk of rapidly rolling out deployments to production. Kayenta is an open-source automated canary analysis service designed to enable teams to quickly push production changes and perform continuous delivery at scale.
Kayenta is based off of Netflix’s internal canary system, but has been updated to handle more advanced use cases and reduce error-prone and time-consuming ad-hoc canary analysis.
“Automated canary analysis is an essential part of the production deployment process at Netflix and we are excited to release Kayenta,” Greg Burrell, senior reliability engineer at Netflix, said in a blog post. “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.”
Kayenta is integrated with the open-source multi-cloud continuous delivery platform Spinnaker. The integration will allow teams to set up an automated canary analysis stage within a Spinnaker pipeline. According to Google, this allows users to specify what metrics and sources to check. Monitoring tools include Stackdriver, Prometheus, Datadog, and Netflix’s internal tool Atlas.
“Spinnaker’s integration with Kayenta allows teams to stay close to their pipelines and deployments without having to jump into a different tool for canary analysis,” said Burrell. “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 minimize deployment risk, while allowing high velocity at scale.”
Other benefits of Kayenta include ability to perform automated canary analysis without vendor lock-in, detect problems across canaries, perform automated canary analysis across multiple environments, and adjust boundaries and parameters while performing automated canary analysis.
“With Kayenta, you now have an open, automated way to perform canary analysis and quickly deploy changes to production with confidence. By open-sourcing Kayenta, our goal is to build a community where metric stores and judges are provided both by the open source community and via proprietary systems,” the Google team wrote in a post.
