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.