Tag Archives: Simian Army

Netflix schedule at CodeMash

If you’re interested in the cloud and how you might leverage Netflix OSS to migrate your company without starting from scratch, you won’t want to miss the Netflix sessions at CodeMash (January 7-10 in Sandusky, OH). We’ll talk about technology, culture, open source, and how they all fit together to make a great product and an amazing work environment.

Yes, I joined Netflix this year, and I’m thrilled that Sudhir Tonse, Roy Rapoport, Jeremy Edberg, and Joe Sondow will be experiencing their first CodeMash. And it’s gonna be a doozy — starting with snow-delayed travel. And, I’m also ecstatic that veteran CodeMash speaker and entrepreneur Andy Glover has joined Netflix (about a month ago!), and will be speaking as well.

Sudhir and Joe are doing a One/Two punch on precompilers. Sudhir will whet your appetite for NetflixOSS in a morning session on Wednesday. Through a test account, you will be able to quickly experience several NetflixOSS projects in “Architecting for the Cloud: Hands on with NetflixOSS”. If you’re sold on the concept, you can join Joe Sondow for an afternoon session, “Setting up your Environment for the AWS Cloud using Netflix OSS”, which will focus on bootstrapping NetflixOSS. We’ll use Peter Sankauskas’ Netflix CloudPrize winning contribution for usability: bootstrapping NetflixOSS with Ansible Playbooks and Cloud Formation templates. And, Peter will join us as a special guest!

We’ll help kick off the conference by joining a panel on “Open Source in Business” on Wednesday night at 7 pm.

You’ll also meet Jeremy Edberg, who will talk about architecting resiliency through failure in “How Netflix Architects for Survival” and how we created a system that allows us to reduce the bureaucracy around system changes while improving how we resolve problems in “Following the Changing Weather of the Clouds”.

Roy Rapoport leads our Insight Engineering team, a team that collects a lot of data and collates it into information then translates that into insights. He will talk about how Python showed up at Netflix and how our focus on Freedom and Responsibility made that possible. His talk is entitled, “Python in the Back Door: How We Brought Python into Netflix”.

And I’ll be sharing Roy’s theme about how programming languages evolve at Netflix, doing a variation of the talk I did at OSCON, “Sneaking Scala Through the Back Door”. Coincidentally, Roy’s team is almost exclusively Scala!

And — we’ll have a vendor session on Thursday, where we will talk about NetflixOSS in an open discussion format. Ask questions about getting started, why we do it, how the culture works. We’ll be there.

Here’s a PDF of the scheduled Netflix talks.

Looking forward to seeing you. Safe travels to Ohio!

 

Conformity Monkey: now open sourced

This week, Netflix open sourced yet another member of the Simian Army: Conformity Monkey. This monkey is charged with inspecting Amazon Machine Images (AMI) to determine if they meet the rules that we have specified.  At Netflix they range from ensuring that security guidelines are met to specifying failover information.

By open sourcing Conformity Monkey, Netflix has made this software widely available so that your guidelines can be specified as rules in your configuration. As standards emerge for cloud deployment, it can be a confusing place for new developers. The use of Conformity Monkey can help structure your environment around emerging best practices, developed internally or in the community as a whole.

Let us know how you might be able to use Conformity Monkey by commenting on the announcement post. We would love to hear from you.

Netflix is hiring for the Simian Army team. Join us to work on the monkeys!

SimianArmy

Open Source Software at Netflix

Netflix has decided to open source many projects, contributing to the mindshare for cloud development. Follow the Netflix Tech Blog for the latest news, but I’ll also highlight things that I think might be interested as I have time.

The Simian Army is Netflix’s solution to keeping your cloud working well. From the Chaos Monkey (which improves your overall, long-term resiliency by shutting down your instances) to the Janitor Monkey (which detects and cleans up instances you no longer need), the Simian Army is worth investigating if you use the Amazon cloud. It’s available as open source, so you can use it and even choose to contribute.

Today, another team at Netflix open sourced Garbage Collection Visualization (gcviz). Being able to look at garbage collection as events is essential to understanding its impact on outages.

Oh, and if you REALLY like the Simian Army, maybe you will come join my team. We’re hiring for work on the Simian Army and Edda.