Google Inc. has released version 1.0 of Spinnaker, an open-source management platform originally developed by Netflix Inc. that enables application code to be deployed in the cloud.

Netflix first built the technology to enable the continuous delivery of software updates to apps and services hosted on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud platform. But in 2014 Netflix began partnering with Google to make Spinnaker compatible with other clouds besides Amazon’s. The technology was first open-sourced in 2015, and has since been adopted by companies including Google-owned Waze, Oracle Corp. and Target Corp.

Google’s product manager Christopher Sanson said in a blog post Tuesday that Spinnaker 1.0 embodies much of what the company has learned about its own application code deployments over the years.

“Along the way we’ve learned some best practices about how to deploy software at velocity — things like automated releases, immutable infrastructure, gradual rollouts and fast rollbacks,” he wrote.

Spinnaker 1.0 now supports Google’s Compute Engine, Container Engine and App Engine, as well as AWS, Microsoft Azure and OpenStack cloud platforms.

Specifically, Spinnaker can help create custom software deployment pipelines that can be used for system and integration tests, spinning up servers, monitoring rollouts and running custom scripts. The software supports a number of common continuous delivery practices, including multiple staging environments, quick rollbacks of code and updates and the use of “release canaries,” which refers to a technique for reducing the risk of introducing new software versions in production by slowly rolling out the change to a small subset of users before making it available to everyone.

“With Spinnaker, you simply choose the deployment strategy you want to use for each environment … and it orchestrates the dozens of steps necessary under-the-hood,” Sanson said.

Spinnaker is useful because it means organizations no longer need to create their own code deployment tools or write complex scripts to roll out continuous updates for their cloud applications, Sanson added.

Google has also released an open-source command line interface called Halyard that can be used to install, configure and upgrade Spinnaker.

Spinnaker can be downloaded from Google’s Cloud Launcher Marketplace as well as GitHub.

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