Netflix Gives Data Center Tools To Fail 75
Nerval's Lobster writes "Netflix has released Hystrix, a library designed for managing interactions between distributed systems, complete with 'fallback' options for when those systems inevitably fail. The code for Hystrix—which Netflix tested on its own systems—can be downloaded at Github, with documentation available here, in addition to a getting-started guide and operations examples, among others. Hystrix evolved out of Netflix's need to manage an increasing rate of calls to its APIs, and resulted in (according to the company) a 'dramatic improvement in uptime and resilience has been achieved through its use.' The Netflix API receives more than 1 billion incoming calls per day, which translates into several billion outgoing calls (averaging a ratio of 1:6) to dozens of underlying systems, with peaks of over 100,000 dependency requests per second. That's according to Netflix engineer Ben Christensen, who described the incredible loads on the company's infrastructure in a February blog posting. The vast majority of those calls serve the discovery user interfaces (UIs) of the more than 800 different devices supported by Netflix."
Re:But does it include the chaos monkey? (Score:5, Informative)
Hystrix does not include Chaos Monkey, but Chaos Monkey was opensourced some time ago.
(I work at Netflix)
Re:800 devices supported (Score:4, Informative)
Probably has something to with the Silverlight deal with Microsoft.
Close, but 'confusing cause and effect'.
Silverlight was a facet of the DRM deal that Netflix made with the Studios. So is not releasing a Linux client (because then, y'know, there would be Netflix rippers and movies on bittorrent...).
Amazon plays movies on Flash on Linux, so Netflix made a bad deal (or perhaps Amazon benefited from not being 'first', same as when Apple pioneered online music with iTunes and got AES AAC while Amazon later had plain MP3). There's also a libnetflixplayer.so ELF-32 on Chromebook, so there's no technical obstacle.
Presumably those contracts have a renewal period. Accept that there's no technical problem and focus on the legal (government) problems instead.