NetEase Cloud Music Open-Sources Horizon: A Kubernetes-Based GitOps Continuous Deployment Platform

NetEase Cloud Music has open-sourced Horizon, a Kubernetes-based cloud-native continuous deployment platform that fully embraces GitOps.

Horizon aims to provide a reliable, secure, and efficient standardized solution for deploying cloud-native applications on Kubernetes, allowing platform teams to create versioned service templates and developers to use predefined templates for automated, best‑practice deployments.

Inspired by Argo CD and AWS Proton, the platform was co‑developed by NetEase Cloud Music and NetEase Data Sail and is now in large‑scale production use across NetEase Cloud Music and NetEase Media, managing data centers in seven regions and handling thousands of builds and releases daily.

Key advantages include standardized deployment via Helm‑based templates, strong security and reliability through GitOps‑driven immutable and auditable changes, openness and extensibility for custom workloads and CRDs, multi‑cloud/hybrid‑cloud support, and high efficiency via low‑code template capabilities.

Core features comprise GitOps‑based deployment, Horizon templates that extend Helm with JSON Schema for default Kubernetes resource configurations, an RBAC & Member system similar to GitLab/GitHub, and external integration options such as OpenAPI, OAuth2.0, Webhooks, and access tokens.

The architecture consists of Horizon‑Core (a Restful server providing OpenAPI for Web UI, CLI, Kubernetes and environment management, template management, token handling, group/application/cluster management, CI/CD pipelines, webhook, user/member, and IDP management), integration with GitLab for configuration storage and Argo CD as the default GitOps engine, Tekton pipelines for CI with artifact storage in S3‑compatible services, Grafana for monitoring, and MySQL/Redis for metadata storage.

Comparisons with Argo CD, OpenShift, and KubeVela highlight Horizon’s added capabilities such as CI support (in progress), Group management, RBAC, and template‑driven standardization, positioning it as a full‑featured platform rather than a pure deployment tool.

The project encourages community involvement; source code, documentation, and Slack/WeChat channels are available via the provided links.