Context over Control: How Netflix gives every developer access to Production

Dec 31, 2019 by Armory

At the 2019 Spinnaker Summit, I interviewed Andy Glover, Director of Delivery Engineering at Netflix about how Netflix uses Spinnaker. Andy provided some great software development cultural takeaways in these two videos:

Context over Control + how Spinnaker works inside Netflix:

1) Netflix has a “learning culture” that believes in context over control. Netflix uses Spinnaker to provide a “safe to try” environment that creates  psychological safety inside the organization (via safety nets like canary deployments, 1-click rollbacks, chaos engineering, etc) that Production level access for developers won’t break customer trust and nuke the entire user base when developers ship code. If you’d like to dig further into this topic, I recommend:

2) Spinnaker inside of Netflix is an intelligent software delivery orchestration platform that codifies the culture of software delivery across teams. Andy also talked about how Spinnaker inside Netflix plugs into many proprietary Netflix systems, acting as an intelligent software delivery orchestration platform – and how Armory and others in the community are building a plug-in framework to reproduce this SDLC intelligence in open-source Spinnaker for Global 2,000 enterprises.

“We run open-source Spinnaker, but we’ve customized it a ton to make Netflix developers’ lives easier and more value-add. A lot of those customizations aren’t available in the wild because what we customized against [inside Netflix] itself isn’t open source.” – Andy Glover, Director, Delivery Engineering at Netflix

The Culture of Software Delivery: How every Developer has access to Production at Netflix

In this video, Kate MacAleavey, Armory’s Head of Culture and Leadership Development and I talk with Andy about the overlap between culture and software delivery:

“About the fear of giving developers freedom: We have a service called API that’s the front door for Netflix for the billions of devices that run Netflix. We show new Netflix employees that ‘you can delete that’… that’s very empowering. As complexity rises, many companies create gates because they don’t trust their people… they put in more rules and rigid things to battle that fear – but what it does is just make people miserable.” – Andy Glover, Director, Delivery Engineering at Netflix

If you’d like to learn more, I recommend Isaac’s Spinnaker Summit keynote on how Spinnaker enables companies to trust their developers.

Share this post:

Recently Published Posts

Lambda Deployment is now supported by Armory CD-as-a-Service

Nov 28, 2023

Armory simplifies serverless deployment: Armory Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service extends its robust deployment capabilities to AWS Lambda.

Read more

New Feature: Trigger Nodes and Source Context

Sep 29, 2023

The Power of Graphs for Ingesting and Acting on Complex Orchestration Logic We’ve been having deep conversations with customers and peer thought leaders about the challenges presented by executing multi-environment continuous deployment, and have developed an appreciation for the power of using visual tools such as directed acyclic graphs (DAG) to understand and share the […]

Read more

Continuous Deployments meet Continuous Communication

Sep 7, 2023

Automation and the SDLC Automating the software development life cycle has been one of the highest priorities for teams since development became a profession. We know that automation can cut down on burnout and increase efficiency, giving back time to ourselves and our teams to dig in and bust out innovative ideas. If it’s not […]

Read more