On March 13, Netflix announced $ 100,000 in prize money for the developers who do the most to improve its open source tools for controlling and managing application deployments on cloud computing. Before spearheading this contest, Netflix’s cloud architect, Adrian Cockcroft, released many internal Netflix tools as open source. Currently, 8 cloud-architecture-specific tools are available from Netflix, and Cockcroft has been very open in sharing his and Netflix’s knowledge in public forms.
In theory, all of this should be wonderful. In reality, however, it’s likely to leave cloud computing with an enormous hangover of subpar practices and architectures for years to come. Netflix is the poster child for “Cloud Computing v1.0″ and demonstrates both the enormous benefits and troubling problems. Cloud Computing v1.0 is a strictly an Amazon Web Services affair — it was first, and no other provider had the core features necessary to build comparable applications (think multiple availability zones and EBS with snapshots and quick restores). So it makes sense that Netflix embraced AWS; it saw huge benefits in being able to deploy and scale its service using the interfaces and architectures that were possible when AWS launched.
But Netflix has also suffered repeatedly at the hands of Cloud Computing v1.0 with four outages in 2012 alone, which certainly points to the possibility for some improvement in the high availability of its service. Of note, the Christmas Eve outage is perhaps most troubling from a “v1.0″ perspective, as it was solely the result of Netflix’s reliance on a less-necessary AWS service for load balancing, which could have been handled in any number of other ways to increase server availability.