Google and Netflix just unveiled a new automated canary analysis tool called Kayenta. The idea behind the tool is that it offers an open-source, automated solution for reducing the risk that’s often associated with rolling out deployments to production at high velocity. Here’s some more information about the service for those who might be interested.
Benefits of Kayenta
Contrary to other canary analysis models, which are often carried out in manual, ad-hoc, or statistically incorrect ways, Kayenta runs automatic statistical tests on user-specified metrics and then returns an aggregate score. So you’ll no longer need to manually inspect logs or graphs that include a variety of metrics across the canary and production in order to make decisions about proposed changes. And you won’t need to worry about other common challenges that go along with these other methods, like speed and scalability bottlenecks, human error, and insufficient support for advanced use cases. You’ll also be able to better inform rollout or rollback decisions and identify bad deployments thanks to the rigorous analysis.
Features of Kayenta
There are a lot of different components that make Kayenta a potentially appealing offering for enterprises. First, the service is built for hybrid and multicloud, so you’ll have a consistent way to detect problems across canaries. It’s also extensible, giving users simple ways to add new metric sources, judges, and data stores so that you can serve diverse environments even as the organization’s needs change. In addition, you can adjust boundaries and parameters while performing automatic analysis and get started without having to write any custom scripts or fetch metrics manually. For advanced cases, Kayenta can even perform a retrospective canary analysis.
Kayenta also offers an integration to Spinnaker, which has produced a new pipeline stage within Spinnaker. This lets users specify which metrics to check from specific sources. Through the scoring procedure, canaries will automatically be classified and sent into different paths to save teams time.
How to get started
Kayenta is currently open source and available for use. If you’re a Spinnaker user, you can upgrade your Spinnaker installation to include Kayenta. It’s also available for access on GitHub so you can access community resources and add your own input.
Photo credit: Pixabay
