Netflix has announced plans to release a bunch of monkeys into the wild — but in this case, “monkeys” refers the cloud development and management tools the company uses to manage its online movie service. For example, it has a Chaos Monkey to help manage VMs, a Security Monkey that looks for vulnerabilities and a Janitor Monkey that shuts down resources that aren’t currently in use. According to Netflix’s Adrian Cockcroft, the company plans “to release pretty much all of our platform, including the Monkey infrastructure, over the rest of this year.” He added, “We will be doing bits and pieces of it through the summer and into the fall.”
Netflix’s service experiences big swings in usage on a regular basis, making it a good candidate for cloud computing. The company relies on Amazon Web Services, and Cockcroft says that has freed its developers to take their ideas and turn them into reality in less than a week. “You click a button and two minutes later your machines are running,” he explained. “That’s the way our developers work and they launch machines directly themselves.”
