During the past two years Netflix has pulled back the curtains to provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse into how it runs one of the most popular video streaming websites on the Internet, almost entirely in the public cloud. The company has open sourced dozens of tools it’s developed internally. In doing so, some argue that Netflix is turning into one of the most important cloud computing companies in the industry, not only by proving that a company making $3.7 billion annually can run some of its most critical workloads in the public cloud, but also by sharing with developers how it’s being done and providing others with a path to follow.
Perhaps the most notable of Netflix’s OSS tools is the Simian Army – a series of tools that test for the tolerance of your cloud deployment by randomly shutting down certain systems. Chaos Monkey automatically selects individual virtual machines to collapse, while Chaos Gorilla does the same thing on a larger scale by replicating an entire Availability Zone in AWS’s cloud to shut down. Other projects like Asgard provide a cloud management dashboard to manage resources, while ICE tracks cloud spending by usage. Revealing the inner secrets of how it manages the tens of thousands of instances it uses in Amazon’s cloud at any given time isn’t all altruistic for Netflix though.
