Netflix to Open Source Army of Cloud Monkeys

“The online movie rental company uses a troupe of cloud software
? it calls the programs ‘monkeys’ ? that poke and prod its online
applications and keep the website and its services humming
along.

“There?s a Chaos Monkey, a program that randomly kills virtual
machines to make sure that small outages will not disrupt the
overall system. They?ve got Security Monkey ? it looks for
configuration and security flaws ? and Janitor Monkey, too: It
looks for system resources that aren?t being used and shuts them
down.

“Over the next few months Netflix will release the source code
for these programs and more, giving cloud developers a look at how
it runs its services on Amazon?s cloud. The plan is ‘to release
pretty much all of our platform, including the Monkey
infrastructure, over the rest of this year,’ says Adrian Cockcroft,
the Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix. ‘We will be doing
bits and pieces of it through the summer and into the fall.'”

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