Netflix Unveils New Open Source Cloud Tool Spinnaker

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Netflix on Monday launched its new open source project Spinnaker. The tool has been developed in partnership with Google, Microsoft and Pivotal. The streaming firm has been working on developing Spinnaker for more than a year now.

Spinnaker – how its better than Asgard?

The new tool is seen as a replacement to Asgard, which was used by Netflix previously to manage Amazon Web Services cloud resources. In September, the streaming firm offered details on the shutdown of Asgard.

Netflix sees Spinnaker as an open source Continuous Delivery platform for releasing software updates. One advantage with Spinnaker is that it is a multi-cloud platform, which can be used by the engineers to run deployments across two cloud providers at the same time.

In a blog post on Monday, Andy Glover, manager of delivery engineering at Netflix, said, “Spinnaker facilitates the creation of pipelines that represent a delivery process that can begin with the creation of some deployable asset (such as an machine image, Jar file, or Docker image) and end with a deployment.”

In a separate post, engineering manager at Google, Rick Buskens, said that these pipelines can be reprocessed across workflows. Apart from Google’s Cloud Platform, Spinnaker also helps in managing the clusters on AWS and Cloud Foundry. According to Netflix, support for Microsoft Azure is “actively underway.”

Spinnaker can be accessed on GitHub now as it is known to be an out-of-the-box setup. The streaming firm informed that the transfer of assets between Asgard and Spinnaker will not be needed as all the changes are compatible between both platforms.

Netflix stock – why moving up on  Monday?

Separately, on Monday, Netflix stock gained over 7% after analysts predicted a boost of almost 50% in earnings per share. The bullish take of analysts is partly based on Netflix’s decision to invest in Bong Joon-ho’s latest film Okja, a follow-up to the Korean director’s global hit, Snowpiercer.

Positive subscriber numbers in Australia also pushed the stock up. According to the latest data from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), around 3.2 million Australians, or 17% of the total population, used streaming services in the last six months to June 2015. Among those users, 78% subscribed to Netflix.

In May, statistics revealed that one million Australians subscribed to Netflix. But the latest data suggests that in just one more month, the U.S .firm was able to gain 1.5 million users in the region.

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