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

How to Become a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Jun 6, 2023

A site reliability engineer (SRE) bridges the gap between IT operations and software development. They understand coding and the overall task of keeping the system operating.  The SRE role originated to give software developers input into how teams deploy and maintain software and to improve it to increase reliability and performance. Before SREs, the software […]

Read more

Continuous Deployment KPIs

May 31, 2023

Key SDLC Performance Metrics for Engineering Leaders Engineering leaders must have an effective system in place to measure their team’s performance and ensure that they are meeting their goals. One way to do this is by monitoring Continuous Deployment Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).  CD and Automated Tests If you’re not aware, Continuous Deployment, or CD, […]

Read more

What Are the Pros and Cons of Rolling Deployments?

May 26, 2023

Rolling deployments use a software release strategy that delivers new versions of an application in phases to minimize downtime. Anyone who has lived through a failed update knows how painful it can be. If a comprehensive update fails, there are hours of downtime while it is rolled back. Even if the deployment happens after hours, […]

Read more