Kayenta is a form of ‘canary analysis’ tool which aims to detect problems before they become a serious issue. Fun fact: Coal miners would once take canaries in cages down into the pits as they are especially sensitive to dangerous gases — if a canary dies, the miners knew to make a quick exit.

An open source tool for automated deployment monitoring has been launched by Netflix and Google to help other companies modernise their practices.

Netflix first began development on Kayenta for internal use but decided it wanted to release it to a wider audience. Much of the code was specific to Netflix, so the company enlisted the help of Google to rewrite parts of it and make it modular. The teams spent about a year undertaking this effort.

Kayenta, like other canary analysis tools, will run checks to quickly ensure no problems will be faced when an upgrade is fully deployed. The system is objective and immune to any human error and potential bias involved with a manual canary test.

To know more about the tool, click here.