Google LLC today introduced Spinnaker for GCP, a new solution that aims to simplify the work of developers building cloud applications.

Spinnaker is an open-source development toolkit jointly maintained by Netflix Inc. and Google. It enables software teams to create continuous delivery, or CD, workflows for their projects.

Continuous delivery is an approach wherein programmers add code to a project several times a day, in bite-size pieces, rather than bundling them together into big, infrequent updates. The benefit of the model is that smaller updates are easier to debug and take less effort to integrate with existing code.

Spinnaker can eliminate many of the manual steps involved in setting up a CD environment, as well as automate day-to-day operations, but it’s a fairy complex piece of technology. With its new solution, Google hopes to lower the entry barrier to deploying the toolkit. 

Spinnaker for GCP is a pre-configured version of the software that the search giant has customized to run on its cloud platform. It’s built atop Google’s recently upgraded Kubernetes Engine and enables developers to set up a CD environment in a few clicks, according to the company.

The offering packs extensive integrations with other Google Cloud services. Companies can use Stackdriver, the provider’s monitoring tool, to ensure that their Spinnaker deployments are running smoothly. Spinnaker for GCP also works with Google Cloud’s software vulnerability scanner, as well as a feature called Binary Authorization that verifies the authenticity of code releases before deployment.

Google’s cloud-based flavor of Spinnaker could have broad appeal. The upstream open-source version is a popular solution in its own right that is used by hundreds of software teams at companies such as Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Cisco Systems Inc. and Box Inc.

Spinnaker for GCP is only the latest offering from Google that focuses on simplifying enterprises’ development workflows. In April, the search giant introduced a set of plugins to ease the task of moving code from  programmers’ workstations to its cloud platform. The extensions, collectively known as Cloud Code, also provide features for integrating applications with Google services such as Maps. 

Image: Google