DevOps poster child Netflix has declared it will use Pivotal’s Spring Boot as its core Java framework despite “having invested so much in internal solutions”.

The streaming media and content production giant has inspired months, possibly years worth of conference talks with both its software development and deployment methodology, and its contributions to the open source tool world.

In blog posting this week, it recapped its contributions, including the Ribbon load balancing and Eureka service discovery tools, and their incorporation into Spring Cloud Netflix,  a “community effort to stitch together the Netflix OSS components using Spring Boot instead of Netflix internal solutions.”

Now, it said, “We are happy to announce that starting in 2018, Netflix is also making the transition to Spring Boot as our core Java framework, leveraging the community’s contributions via Spring Cloud Netflix.”

This was despite having invested in its own internal tools to do the same job.

“In the early 2010s, key requirements for Netflix cloud infrastructure were reliability, scalability, efficiency, and security. Lacking suitable alternatives, we created solutions in-house,” the post explained.

Now, “The Spring product has evolved and expanded to meet all of these requirements, some through the usage and adaptation of Netflix’s very own software! In addition, community solutions have evolved beyond Netflix’s original needs.”

Netflix gave Kudos to Pivotal in the post, saying, “Whether it be Github issues and feature requests, in-person conversations at conferences or real-time chats over Gitter/Slack, the responses from Pivotal have been excellent.”

Will this mean Netflix ceasing to be a core component of the DevOps and open source conversation and conference circuit? Unlikely it seems.

Netflix said it would leverage Spring components to replace “aging Netflix software”. At the same time, it continued, “Where there is new innovation to bring — such as the new Netflix Adaptive Concurrency Limiters — we want to help contribute these back to the community.”