devops case study netflix

• Product Engineering And Development Simform acts as a strategic software engineering partner to build products designed to cater the unique requirements of each client. From rapid prototyping to iterative development, we help you validate your idea and make it a reality.
• Performance Engineering and Testing Our service portfolio offers a full spectrum of world-class performance engineering services. We employ a dual-shift approach to help you plan capacity proactively for increased ROI and faster delivery.
• Digital Experience Design Work with cross-functional teams of smart designers and product visionaries to create incredible UX and CX experiences. Simform pairs human-centric design thinking methodologies with industry-led tech expertise to transform user journeys and create incredible digital experience designs.
• Application Management and Modernization Simform’s application modernization experts enable IT leaders to create a custom roadmap and help migrate to modern infrastructure using cloud technologies to generate better ROI and reduce cloud expenditure.
• Project Strategy At Simform, we don’t just build digital products, but we also define project strategies to improve your organization’s operations. We use Agile software development with DevOps acceleration, to improve the software delivery process and encourage reliable releases that bring exceptional end-user experience.
• Cloud Native App Development Build, test, deploy, and scale on the cloud
• Cloud Consulting Audit cloud infrastructure, optimize cost and maximize cloud ROI
• Microservice Architecture Remodel your app into independent and scalable microservices
• Kubernetes Consulting Container orchestration made simple
• Cloud Migration Consulting Assess, discover, design, migrate and optimize the cloud workloads
• Cloud Assessment Assess cloud spending, performance, and bottlenecks
• Serverless Seize the power of auto-scaling and reduced operational costs
• Cloud Architecture Design Optimize your architecture to scale effectively
• DevOps Consulting DevOps implementation strategies to accelerate software delivery
• Infrastructure Management and Monitoring Competently setup, configure, monitor and optimize the cloud infrastructure
• Containerization and Orchestration Reliably manage the lifecycle of containers in large and dynamic environments
• Infrastructure as a Code Manage and provision IT infrastructure though code
• CI/CD Implementation Automate and efficiently manage complex software development
• BI and Data Engineering Our Data and BI experts help you bridge the gap between your data sources and business goals to analyze and examine data, gather meaningful insights, and make actionable business decisions.
• Test Automation Reduce manual testing and focus on improving the turnaround time
• Microservice Testing Make your microservices more reliable with robust testing
• API Testing Build safer application and system integrations
• Performance Testing Identify performance bottlenecks and build a stable product
• Load Testing Achieve consistent performance under extreme load conditions
• Security Testing Uncover vulnerabilities and mitigate malicious threats
• Technology Partnerships Reap benefits of our partnerships with top infrastructure platforms
• Process Management Right processes to deliver competitive digital products
• SaaS Development Services Build competitive SaaS apps with best experts & tools
• Cloud Migration Scale your infrastructure with AWS cloud migration
• Cloud Solutions for SMB Make your business smarter with AWS SMB
• Data Engineering Collect, process, and analyze data with AWS data engineering
• Serverless and Orchestration Manage complex workflows and ensure optimal resource utilization
• Cloud Management Improve AWS efficiency, automation, and visibility for better cloud operations
• AWS DevOps Consulting Accelerate the development of scalable cloud-native applications
• Advertising and Marketing Technology Transform customer engagement with AWS Advertising expertise
• AWS Retail Services Improve customer engagement and address retail challenges efficiently.
• AWS Healthcare Services Improve patient care and streamline operations with AWS
• AWS Supply Chain Services Achieve supply chain efficiency and real-time visibility
• AWS Finance Services Accelerate financial innovation with AWS expertise
• Technology Comparisons
• How it works

How Netflix Became A Master of DevOps? An Exclusive Case Study

Find out how Netflix excelled at DevOps without even thinking about it and became a gold standard in the DevOps world.

Table of Contents

• Netflix's move to the cloud

Netflix’s Chaos Monkey and the Simian Army

Netflix’s container journey, netflix’s “operate what you build” culture, lessons we can learn from netflix’s devops strategy, how simform can help.

Even though Netflix is an entertainment company, it has left many top tech companies behind in terms of tech innovation. With its single video-streaming application, Netflix has significantly influenced the technology world with its world-class engineering efforts, culture, and product development over the years.

One such practice that Netflix is a fantastic example of is DevOps. Their DevOps culture has enabled them to innovate faster, leading to many business benefits. It also helped them achieve near-perfect uptime, push new features faster to the users, and increase their subscribers and streaming hours.

With nearly 214 million subscribers worldwide and streaming in over 190 countries , Netflix is globally the most used streaming service today. And much of this success is owed to its ability to adopt newer technologies and its DevOps culture that allows them to innovate quickly to meet consumer demands and enhance user experiences. But Netflix doesn’t think DevOps.

So how did they become the poster child of DevOps? In this case study, you’ll learn about how Netflix organically developed a DevOps culture with out-of-the-box ideas and how it benefited them.

Simform is a leading DevOps consulting and implementation company , helping businesses build innovative products that meet dynamic user demands efficiently. To grow your business with DevOps, contact us today!

Netflix’s move to the cloud

It all began with the worst outage in Netflix’s history when they faced a major database corruption in 2008 and couldn’t ship DVDs to their members for three days. At the time, Netflix had roughly 8.4 million customers and one-third of them were affected by the outage. It prompted Netflix to move to the cloud and give their infrastructure a complete makeover. Netflix chose AWS as its cloud partner and took nearly seven years to complete its cloud migration.

Netflix didn’t just forklift the systems and dump them into AWS. Instead, it chose to rewrite the entire application in the cloud to become truly cloud-native, which fundamentally changed the way the company operated. In the words of Yury Izrailevsky, Vice President, Cloud and Platform Engineering at Netflix:

“We realized that we had to move away from vertically scaled single points of failure, like relational databases in our datacenter, towards highly reliable, horizontally scalable, distributed systems in the cloud.”

As a significant part of their transformation, Netflix converted its monolithic, data center-based Java application into cloud-based Java microservices architecture. It brought about the following changes:

• Denormalized data model using NoSQL databases
• Enabled teams at Netflix to be loosely coupled
• Allowed teams to build and push changes at the speed that they were comfortable with
• Centralized release coordination
• Multi-week hardware provisioning cycles led to continuous delivery
• Engineering teams made independent decisions using self-service tools

As a result, it helped Netflix accelerate innovation and stumble upon the DevOps culture. Netflix also gained eight times as many subscribers as it had in 2008. And Netflix’s monthly streaming hours also grew a thousand times from Dec 2007 to Dec 2015.

After completing their cloud migration to AWS by 2016, Netflix had:

And it handled all of the above with 0 Network Ops Centers and some 70 operations engineers, who were all software engineers focusing on writing tools that enabled other software developers to focus on things they were good at.

Migrating to the cloud made Netflix resilient to the kind of outages it faced in 2008. But they wanted to be prepared for any unseen errors that could cause them equivalent or worse damage in the future.

Engineers at Netflix perceived that the best way to avoid failure was to fail constantly. And so they set out to make their cloud infrastructure more safe, secure, and available the DevOps way – by automating failure and continuous testing.

Chaos Monkey

Netflix created Chaos Monkey, a tool to constantly test its ability to survive unexpected outages without impacting the consumers. Chaos Monkey is a script that runs continuously in all Netflix environments, randomly killing production instances and services in the architecture. It helped developers:

• Identify weaknesses in the system
• Build automatic recovery mechanisms to deal with the weaknesses
• Test their code in unexpected failure conditions
• Build fault-tolerant systems on day to day basis

The Simian Army

After their success with Chaos Monkey, Netflix engineers wanted to test their resilience to all sorts of inevitable failures, detect abnormal conditions. So, they built the Simian Army , a virtual army of tools discussed below.

• Latency Monkey

It creates false delays in the RESTful client-server communication layers, simulating service degradation and checking if the upstream services respond correctly. Moreover, creating very large delays can simulate an entire service downtime without physically bringing it down and testing the ability to survive. The tool was particularly useful to test new services by simulating the failure of dependencies without affecting the rest of the system.

• Conformity Monkey

It looks for instances that do not adhere to the best practices and shuts them down, giving the service owner a chance to re-launch them properly.

• Doctor Monkey

It detects unhealthy instances by tapping into health checks running on each instance and also monitors other external health signs (such as CPU load). The unhealthy instances are removed from service and terminated after service owners identify the root cause of the problem.

• Janitor Monkey

It ensures the cloud environment runs without clutter and waste. It also searches for unused resources and discards them.

• Security Monkey

An extension of Conformity Monkey, it identifies security violations or vulnerabilities (e.g., improperly configured AWS security groups) and eliminates the offending instances. It also ensures the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and DRM (Digital Rights Management) certificates were valid and not due for renewal.

• 10-18 Monkey

Short for Localization-Internationalization, it identifies configuration and runtime issues in instances serving users in multiple geographic locations with different languages and character sets.

• Chaos Gorilla

Like Chaos Monkey, the Gorilla simulates an outage of a whole Amazon availability zone to verify if the services automatically re-balance to the functional availability zones without manual intervention or any visible impact on users.

Today, Netflix still uses Chaos Engineering and has a dedicated team for chaos experiments called the Resilience Engineering team (earlier called the Chaos team).

In a way, Simian Army incorporated DevOps principles of automation, quality assurance, and business needs prioritization. As a result, it helped Netflix develop the ability to deal with unexpected failures and minimize their impact on users. 

On 21st April 2011 , AWS experienced a large outage in the US East region, but Netflix’s streaming ran without any interruption. And on 24th December 2012 , AWS faced problems in Elastic Load Balancer(ELB) services, but Netflix didn’t experience an immediate blackout. Netflix’s website was up throughout the outage, supporting most of their services and streaming, although with higher latency on some devices.

Netflix had a cloud-native, microservices-driven VM architecture that was amazingly resilient, CI/CD enabled, and elastically scalable. It was more reliable, with no SPoFs (single points of failure) and small manageable software components. So why did they adopt container technology? The major factors that prompted Netflix’s investment in containers are:

• Container images used in local development are very similar to those run in production. This end-to-end packaging allows developers to build and test applications easily in production-like environments, reducing development overhead.
• Container images help build application-specific images easily.
• Containers are lightweight, allowing building and deploying them faster than VM infrastructure.
• Containers only have what a single application needs, are smaller and densely packed, which reduces overall infrastructure cost and footprint.
• Containers improve developer productivity, allowing them to develop, deploy, and innovate faster.

Moreover, Netflix teams had already started using containers and seen tangible benefits. But they faced some challenges such as migrating to containers without refactoring, ensuring seamless connectivity between VMs and containers, and more. As a result, Netflix designed a container management platform called Titus to meet its unique requirements.

Titus provided a scalable and reliable container execution solution to Netflix and seamlessly integrated with AWS. In addition, it enabled easy deployment of containerized batches and service applications.

Titus served as a standard deployment unit and a generic batch job scheduling system. It helped Netflix expand support to growing batch use cases. 

• Batch users could also put together sophisticated infrastructure quickly and pack larger instances across many workloads efficiently. Batch users could immediately schedule locally developed code for scaled execution on Titus.
• Beyond batch, service users benefited from Titus with simpler resource management and local test environments consistent with production deployment.
• Developers could also push new versions of applications faster than before.

Overall, Titus deployments were done in one or two minutes which took tens of minutes earlier. As a result, both batch and service users could experiment locally, test quickly and deploy with greater confidence than before.

“The theme that underlies all these improvements is developer innovation velocity.” 

-Netflix tech blog

This velocity enabled Netflix to deliver fast features to the customers, making containers extremely important for their business.

Netflix invests and experiments significantly in improving development and operations for the engineering teams. But before Netflix adopted the “Operate what you build” model, it had siloed teams. The Ops teams focused on deploy, operate and support parts of the software life cycle. And Developers handed off the code to the ops team for deployment and operation. So each stage in the SDLC was owned by a different person and looked like this:

The specialized roles created efficiencies within each segment but created inefficiencies across the entire SDLC. The issues that they faced were:

• Individual silos that slowed down end-to-end progress
• Added communication overhead, bottlenecks and hampered effectiveness of feedback loops
• Knowledge transfers between developers and ops/SREs were lossy
• Higher time-to-detect and time-to-resolve for deployment problems
• Longer gaps between code complete and deployment, with releases taking weeks

Operate what you build

To deal with the above challenges and drawing inspiration from DevOps principles, Netflix encouraged shared ownership of the full SDLC and broke down silos. The teams developing a system were responsible for operating and supporting it. Each team owned its own deployment issues, performance bugs, alerting gaps, capacity planning, partner support, and so on.

Moreover, they also introduced centralized tooling to simplify and automate dealing with common development problems of the teams. When additional tooling needs arise, the central team assesses if the needs are common across multiple development teams and built tools. In case of too team-specific problems, the development team decides if their need is important enough to solve on their own.

Full Cycle Developers

Combining the above ideas, Netflix built an even better model where dev teams are equipped with amazing productivity tools and are responsible for the entire SDLC, as shown below.

Netflix provided ongoing training and support in different forms (e.g., dev boot camps) to help new developers build up these skills. Easy-to-use tools for deployment pipelines also helped the developers, e.g., Spinnaker. It is a Continuous Delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence.

However, such models require a significant shift in the mindsets of teams/developers. To apply this model outside Netflix, you can start with evaluating what you need, count costs, and be mindful of bringing in the least amount of complexities necessary. And then attempt a mindset shift.

Netflix practices are unique to their work environment and needs and might not suit all organizations. But here are a few lessons to learn from their DevOps strategy and apply:

• Don’t build systems that say no to your developers

Netflix has no push schedules, push windows, or crucibles that developers must go through to push their code into production. Instead, every engineer at Netflix has full access to the production environment. And there are neither strict policies nor procedures that prevent them from accessing the production environment.

• Focus on giving freedom and responsibility to the engineers

Netflix aims to hire intelligent people and provide them with the freedom to solve problems in their own way that they see as best. So it doesn’t have to create artificial constraints and guardrails to predict what their developers need to do. But instead, hire people who can develop a balance of freedom and responsibility.

• Don’t think about uptime at all costs

Netflix servers their millions of users with a near-perfect uptime. But it didn’t think about uptime when they started chaos testing their environment to deal with unexpected failure.

• Prize the velocity of innovation

Netflix wants its engineers to do fun, exciting things and develop new features to delight its customers with reduced time-to-market.

• Eliminate a lot of processes and procedures

They limit an organization from moving fast. So instead, Netflix focuses on hiring people they can trust and have independent decision-making capabilities.

• Practice context over control

Netflix doesn’t control and contain too much. What they do focus on is context. Managers at Netflix ensure that their teams have a quality and constant flow of context of the business, rather than controlling them.

• Don’t do a lot of required standards, but focus on enablement

Teams at Netflix can work with their choice of programming languages, libraries, frameworks, or IDEs as they see best. In addition, they don’t have to go through any research or approval processes to rewrite a portion of the system.

• Don’t do silos, walls, and fences

Netflix teams know where they fit in the ecosystem, their workings with other teams, dependents, and dependencies. There are no operational fences over which developers can throw the code for production.

• Adopt “you build it, you run it” culture

Netflix focuses on making ownership easy. So it has the “operate what you build” culture but with the enablement idea that we learned about earlier.

• Focus on data

Netflix is a data-driven, decision-driven company. It doesn’t do guesses or fall victim to gut instincts and traditional thinking. It invests in algorithms and systems that combs enormous amounts of data quickly and notify when there’s an issue.

• Always put customer satisfaction first

The end goal of DevOps is to make customer-driven and focus on enhancing the user experience with every release.

• Don’t do DevOps, but focus on the culture

At Netflix, DevOps emerged as the wonderful result of their healthy culture, thinking and practices.

Get in Touch

Netflix has been a gold standard in the DevOps world for years, but copy-pasting their culture might not work for every organization. DevOps is a mindset that requires molding your processes and organizational structure to continuously improve the software quality and increase your business value. DevOps can be approached through many practices such as automation, continuous integration, delivery, deployment, continuous testing, monitoring, and more.

At Simform, our engineering teams will help you streamline the delivery and deployment pipelines with the right DevOps toolchain and skills. Our DevOps managed services will help accelerate the product life cycle, innovate faster and achieve maximum business efficiency by delivering high-quality software with reduced time-to-market.

Hiren Dhaduk

Hiren is VP of Technology at Simform with an extensive experience in helping enterprises and startups streamline their business performance through data-driven innovation.

Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Your comment here*

Sign up for the free Newsletter

For exclusive strategies not found on the blog

Sign up today!

Related Posts

Kubernetes Architecture and Components with Diagram

11 Powerful Docker Alternatives to Revolutionize Containerization in 2024

DevOps, CI/CD and Containerization: 44 Images Explaining a Winning Trio

• Publications
• News and Events
• Education and Outreach

Software Engineering Institute

Cite this post.

AMS Citation

Cois, C., 2015: DevOps Case Study: Netflix and the Chaos Monkey. Carnegie Mellon University, Software Engineering Institute's Insights (blog), Accessed April 11, 2024, https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/blog/devops-case-study-netflix-and-the-chaos-monkey/.

APA Citation

Cois, C. (2015, April 30). DevOps Case Study: Netflix and the Chaos Monkey. Retrieved April 11, 2024, from https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/blog/devops-case-study-netflix-and-the-chaos-monkey/.

Chicago Citation

Cois, C. Aaron. "DevOps Case Study: Netflix and the Chaos Monkey." Carnegie Mellon University, Software Engineering Institute's Insights (blog) . Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute, April 30, 2015. https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/blog/devops-case-study-netflix-and-the-chaos-monkey/.

IEEE Citation

C. Cois, "DevOps Case Study: Netflix and the Chaos Monkey," Carnegie Mellon University, Software Engineering Institute's Insights (blog) . Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute, 30-Apr-2015 [Online]. Available: https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/blog/devops-case-study-netflix-and-the-chaos-monkey/. [Accessed: 11-Apr-2024].

BibTeX Code

@misc{cois_2015, author={Cois, C. Aaron}, title={DevOps Case Study: Netflix and the Chaos Monkey}, month={Apr}, year={2015}, howpublished={Carnegie Mellon University, Software Engineering Institute's Insights (blog)}, url={https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/blog/devops-case-study-netflix-and-the-chaos-monkey/}, note={Accessed: 2024-Apr-11} }

DevOps Case Study: Netflix and the Chaos Monkey

C. Aaron Cois

April 30, 2015, published in.

This post has been shared 3 times.

DevOps can be succinctly defined as a mindset of molding your process and organizational structures to promote

• business value
• software quality attributes most important to your organization
• continuous improvement

As I have discussed in previous posts on DevOps at Amazon and software quality in DevOps , while DevOps is often approached through practices such as Agile development, automation, and continuous delivery, the spirit of DevOps can be applied in many ways. In this blog post, I am going to look at another seminal case study of DevOps thinking applied in a somewhat out-of-the-box way: Netflix .

Netflix is a fantastic case study for DevOps because their software-engineering process shows a fundamental understanding of DevOps thinking and a focus on quality attributes through automation-assisted process. Recall, DevOps practitioners espouse a driven focus on quality attributes to meet business needs, leveraging automated processes to achieve consistency and efficiency.

Netflix's streaming service is a large distributed system hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) . Since there are so many components that have to work together to provide reliable video streams to customers across a wide range of devices, Netflix engineers needed to focus heavily on the quality attributes of reliability and robustness for both server- and client-side components. In short, they concluded that the only way to be comfortable handling failure is to constantly practice failing. To achieve the desired level of confidence and quality, in true DevOps style, Netflix engineers set about automating failure .

If you have ever used Netflix software on your computer, a game console, or a mobile device, you may have noticed that while the software is impressively reliable, occasionally the available streams of videos change. Sometimes, the 'Recommended Picks' stream may not appear, for example. When this happens it is because the service in AWS that serves the 'Recommended Picks' data is down. However, your Netflix application doesn't crash, it doesn't throw any errors, and it doesn't suffer from any degradation in performance. Netflix software merely omits the stream, or displays an alternate stream, with no hindered experience to the user--exhibiting ideal, elegant failure behavior.

To achieve this result, Netflix dramatically altered their engineering process by introducing a tool called Chaos Monkey , the first in a series of tools collectively known as the Netflix Simian Army . Chaos Monkey is basically a script that runs continually in all Netflix environments, causing chaos by randomly shutting down server instances. Thus, while writing code, Netflix developers are constantly operating in an environment of unreliable services and unexpected outages. This chaos not only gives developers a unique opportunity to test their software in unexpected failure conditions, but incentivizes them to build fault-tolerant systems to make their day-to-day job as developers less frustrating. This is DevOps at its finest: altering the development process and using automation to set up a system where the behavioral economics favors producing a desirable level of software quality. In response to creating software in this type of environment, Netflix developers will design their systems to be modular, testable, and highly resilient against back-end service outages from the start.

In a DevOps organization, leaders must ask: What can we do to incentivize the organization to achieve the outcomes we want? How can we change our organization to drive ever-closer to our goals? To master DevOps and dramatically improve outcomes in your organization, this is the type of thinking you must encourage.

Then, most importantly, organizations must be willing to make the changes and sacrifices necessary (such as intentionally, continually causing failures) to set themselves up for success. As evidence to the value of their investment, Netflix has credited this 'chaos testing' approach to giving their systems the resiliency to handle the 9/25/14 reboot of 10 percent of AWS servers without issue. The unmitigated success of this approach inspired the creation of the Simian Army, a full suite of tools to enable chaos testing, which is now available as open source software .

Every two weeks, the SEI will publish a new blog post offering guidelines and practical advice for organizations seeking to adopt DevOps in practice. We welcome your feedback on this series, as well as suggestions for future content. Please leave feedback in the comments section below.

Additional Resources

To view the webinar Culture Shock: Unlocking DevOps with Collaboration and Communication with Aaron Volkmann and Todd Waits please click here .

To view the webinar What DevOps is Not! with Hasan Yasar and C. Aaron Cois, please click here .

To listen to the podcast D evOps--Transform Development and Operations for Fast, Secure Deployments featuring Gene Kim and Julia Allen, please click here .

To read all of the blog posts in our DevOps series, please click here .

Author Page

Digital library publications, send a message, more by the author, continuous integration in devops, april 8, 2015 • by c. aaron cois, devops case study: amazon aws, february 5, 2015 • by c. aaron cois, january 26, 2015 • by c. aaron cois, devops and your organization: where to begin, december 18, 2014 • by c. aaron cois, devops and agile, november 13, 2014 • by c. aaron cois, more in devsecops, example case: using devsecops to redefine minimum viable product, march 11, 2024 • by joe yankel, acquisition archetypes seen in the wild, devsecops edition: clinging to the old ways, december 18, 2023 • by william e. novak, extending agile and devsecops to improve efforts tangential to software product development, august 7, 2023 • by david sweeney , lyndsi a. hughes, 5 challenges to implementing devsecops and how to overcome them, june 12, 2023 • by joe yankel , hasan yasar, actionable data from the devsecops pipeline, may 1, 2023 • by bill nichols , julie b. cohen, get updates on our latest work..

Sign up to have the latest post sent to your inbox weekly.

Each week, our researchers write about the latest in software engineering, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. Sign up to get the latest post sent to your inbox the day it's published.

DEV Community

Posted on Sep 9, 2023

Case Study on Netflix | A DevOps Culture

Netflix is a leading streaming service that has revolutionized the entertainment industry. The company has successfully implemented a DevOps culture to ensure the reliability, scalability, and fault-tolerance of its infrastructure. Here's a complete end-to-end case study of Netflix, along with the challenges it faced and how it overcame them:

Background : Netflix was founded in 1997 as a DVD rental service and later pivoted to online streaming in 2007. Today, it has over 200 million subscribers in more than 190 countries. The company's streaming service runs on a cloud-based infrastructure that spans multiple regions and availability zones around the world.

Challenges: Netflix faced several challenges in building and maintaining its infrastructure, including:

Scalability : As the company grew, it needed a scalable infrastructure that could handle increasing traffic and demand for its services.

Availability : With millions of users relying on its service for entertainment, Netflix needed a highly available infrastructure that could ensure uninterrupted service.

Fault-tolerance : Netflix needed a fault-tolerant infrastructure that could withstand failures in its underlying infrastructure components, such as servers and networks.

Speed : As a streaming service, Netflix needed a fast and responsive infrastructure that could deliver content quickly to users.

Solution: To address these challenges, Netflix implemented a DevOps culture that emphasized collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement. The company's DevOps engineers are responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure that powers its streaming service. Here's how Netflix's DevOps team overcame the challenges:

Scalability : Netflix uses a cloud-based infrastructure that is designed to scale horizontally as demand increases. The company uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host its infrastructure, which allows it to quickly and easily add or remove resources as needed.

Availability : Netflix uses a distributed architecture that is designed to be highly available. The company's infrastructure is divided into several smaller services that can be scaled independently and are designed to withstand failures.

Fault-tolerance : Netflix uses a fault-tolerant architecture that is designed to handle failures in its underlying infrastructure components. The company uses tools like Chaos Monkey, which randomly shuts down servers and other components in the infrastructure to test its resiliency.

Speed : Netflix uses a content delivery network (CDN) that is designed to deliver content quickly to users. The company also uses several other techniques to optimize the delivery of content, such as adaptive bitrate streaming and caching.

Netflix also uses a variety of tools and technologies to automate and streamline its software delivery process. The company uses continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) tools like Spinnaker to automate the deployment of its infrastructure and applications.

Results : Netflix's DevOps culture has helped the company achieve several notable results, including:

High availability : Netflix has achieved an uptime of over 99.99% for its streaming service, which is a testament to the reliability and fault-tolerance of its infrastructure.

Speed : Netflix can deliver content quickly to users, thanks to its CDN and other optimizations.

Scalability : Netflix can quickly and easily add or remove resources as needed to handle changing demand for its services.

Innovation : Netflix's DevOps culture has enabled the company to rapidly innovate and launch new features, such as the ability to download content for offline viewing.

Conclusion : Netflix's successful implementation of a DevOps culture has enabled it to build and maintain a highly available, scalable, and fault-tolerant infrastructure. The company's DevOps engineers use a variety of tools and technologies to automate and streamline the software delivery process, ensuring that it can deliver high-quality content to its millions of users around the world.

Top comments (0)

Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use.

Are you sure you want to hide this comment? It will become hidden in your post, but will still be visible via the comment's permalink .

Hide child comments as well

For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse

Biggest lesson learned from Nodejs Documentary

Mateus Toledo - Apr 1

Using Custom Authorization - Request based for AWS Lambda

🅷🅰🆁🅳🅸🅺 🅹🅾🆂🅷🅸 - Mar 23

Qdrant 1.8.0 - Major Performance Enhancements

David Myriel - Mar 8

AWS Amplify : Website Migration

We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.

• Blog Press Release Expert Q & A Podcasts Whitepapers Infographics Tech Tales FAQ Infographics -->

How Netflix Became A Master of DevOps?

Table of Contents

• Netflix's Move to the Cloud

Netflix’s Chaos Monkey and the Simian Army

Netflix’s container journey, netflix’s “operate what you build” culture.

• Lessons we can learn from Netflix’s DevOps Strategy
• How Netsmartz can Help
• Share this article

Looking for Top 3.5% Pre-Screened Talent?

Netflix, an entertainment giant, has emerged as a pioneering force in the tech world due to its unparalleled tech innovation. Through its single video-streaming application, Netflix has left many top tech companies trailing behind, showcasing world-class engineering, a unique culture, and groundbreaking product development.

Among the outstanding practices, Netflix serves as a shining example of DevOps, which has been a catalyst for its rapid innovation and numerous business advantages. Their DevOps culture has enabled them to achieve near-flawless uptime, expedite the rollout of new features to users, and witness substantial growth in subscribers and streaming hours.

With an impressive global reach of nearly 214 million subscribers across 190 countries, Netflix stands as the world’s most widely used streaming service. This remarkable success can be attributed to their ability to embrace cutting-edge technologies and their DevOps culture, allowing them to respond to consumer demands and elevate user experiences swiftly. Surprisingly, despite being the poster child of DevOps, Netflix doesn’t explicitly identify as such.

In this insightful case study, we’ll delve into how Netflix organically cultivated a DevOps culture through innovative and unconventional approaches, ultimately reaping significant benefits from this transformative mindset.

Netflix’s Move to the Cloud

Netflix’s move to the cloud was not only driven by the need for improved infrastructure but also a shift towards embracing modern technology practices such as DevOps services . The outage in 2008 served as a wake-up call, leading Netflix to partner with AWS for their cloud migration and DevOps consulting services. Instead of a straightforward transfer, they opted to rewrite their entire application in the cloud to become truly cloud-native and capitalize on the benefits of DevOps services. This approach allowed Netflix to adopt a microservices architecture, enhancing their scalability, reliability, and overall user experience. By integrating DevOps services into its transformation, Netflix solidified its position as a tech innovation leader in the entertainment industry.

Netflix’s move to a denormalized data model using NoSQL databases played a pivotal role in enabling their teams to operate with greater independence and flexibility. This shift allowed each team to build and deploy changes at their preferred pace, fostering a culture of innovation and agility.

Centralized release coordination replaced the previous cumbersome multi-week hardware provisioning cycles, facilitating seamless and efficient continuous delivery. This transformation also introduced self-service tools, empowering engineering teams to make independent decisions and take ownership of their processes.

As a result, Netflix witnessed a remarkable surge in innovation and embraced the essence of DevOps culture. Notably, their subscriber base grew an astounding eightfold from the previous year, demonstrating the substantial impact of these changes. Moreover, Netflix’s monthly streaming hours soared by a thousandfold from December 2007 to December 2015, reflecting their unprecedented success in the entertainment industry.

[Also Read: Best Practices for Successful DevOps Transformation ]

Netflix’s transition to the cloud brought about resiliency, mitigating the risks of past outages. Yet, the engineering team sought to ensure they could handle any unforeseen errors that might pose significant challenges in the future.

1. Chaos Monkey

Recognizing the power of constant failure to avoid larger disasters, Netflix embraced a DevOps approach to enhance its cloud infrastructure’s safety, security, and availability. They achieved this through the ingenious creation of Chaos Monkey, a tool designed to continually test the system’s ability to endure unexpected outages without affecting consumers. Chaos Monkey randomly terminates production instances and services within the architecture by running as a continuous script across all Netflix environments.

Chaos Monkey’s implementation has proven invaluable for Netflix developers, serving multiple purposes:

• Identifying system weaknesses and vulnerabilities,
• Encouraging the development of automatic recovery mechanisms to address these weaknesses,
• Facilitating code testing under various unexpected failure scenarios,
• Fostering the continuous building of fault-tolerant systems.

2. The Simian Army

Following their triumph with Chaos Monkey, Netflix engineers were determined to bolster their resilience against a broader range of failures and abnormalities. Thus, they devised the Simian Army, an ingenious virtual arsenal of tools with distinctive capabilities.

Latency Monkey

The first member of this dynamic army, Latency Monkey, introduces simulated delays in RESTful client-server communication, mimicking service degradation. This allows Netflix to assess upstream services’ response and ability to handle such conditions. By creating substantial delays, they can simulate complete service downtime, evaluating the system’s survivability without physically taking services offline. This proved particularly valuable for testing new services, affecting the failure of dependencies without impacting the overall system.

Conformity Monkey

Another valuable tool in the Simian Army is Conformity Monkey, which diligently scans for instances that deviate from the most promising methods and promptly shuts them down. This action prompts the service owners to re-launch these instances correctly, ensuring adherence to standard practices.

Doctor Monkey

Doctor Monkey is responsible for identifying unhealthy models by tapping into health checks and monitoring external health indicators, such as CPU load. The identified unhealthy instances are promptly dismissed from service and terminated once the service owners address the root cause.

Janitor Monkey

Janitor Monkey is tasked with maintaining a clutter-free cloud environment, diligently searching for and disposing of unused resources, and ensuring optimal resource utilization.

Security Monkey

Security Monkey, a wing of Conformity Monkey, takes on the critical role of identifying security breaches or vulnerabilities, such as improperly configured AWS security groups. It promptly removes offending instances to maintain a secure environment. Additionally, Security Monkey verifies the validity of SSL and DRM certificates, ensuring timely renewals when needed.

10-18 Monkey

Netflix’s Simian Army, a collection of innovative tools, embodied the principles of DevOps, focusing on automation, quality assurance, and business prioritization. Among these tools, 10-18 Monkey, short for Localization-Internationalization, played a crucial role in identifying configuration and runtime issues for instances serving users across diverse geographic locations with varying languages and backgrounds.

Chaos Gorilla

Another member of this resilient army was Chaos Gorilla, which emulated the entire outage of an Amazon availability area. By doing so, it rigorously tested the system’s ability to automatically re-balance to operational availability locations without any manual intervention or visible impact on users.

Titus, a powerful deployment unit and versatile batch job scheduling system, played a pivotal role in Netflix’s expansion of support for growing batch use cases. It facilitated seamless scalability and efficient resource utilization for batch users, enabling them to rapidly assemble sophisticated infrastructure and optimize larger instances across multiple workloads. This empowered batch users to swiftly schedule locally developed code for execution on Titus, streamlining their processes and boosting productivity.

Beyond its impact on batch operations, Titus also brought significant benefits to service users. It simplified resource management and provided local test environments consistent with production deployment, ensuring a seamless transition from development to deployment. Developers experienced a remarkable improvement in pushing new versions of applications, enabling faster iterations and enhancing the overall development cycle.

The speed and efficiency of Titus’s deployments were nothing short of revolutionary. What took tens of minutes was accomplished in just one or two minutes. This expedited process allowed batch and service users to experiment locally, conduct quick tests, and deploy with unwavering confidence, ultimately leading to a more agile and robust development ecosystem.

Titus was a game-changer for Netflix, fostering innovation, efficiency, and confidence across their operations. Its seamless integration into Netflix’s infrastructure exemplifies how cutting-edge technology solutions can significantly elevate the capabilities and performance of a leading entertainment platform.

In response to these challenges, Netflix profoundly shifted towards the “Operate what you build” model. They invested significantly in improving development and operations, emphasizing experimentation and innovation for engineering teams. This evolution fostered a more collaborative, DevOps-oriented approach, where developers now took ownership of the entire SDLC, including deployment and operation.

Integrating DevOps cloud services further enhanced their capabilities, enabling faster and smoother development cycles. By unifying development and operations, Netflix successfully overcame the inefficiencies and bottlenecks, ensuring more seamless end-to-end progress and shorter timeframes for code deployment.

Ultimately, this embrace of a comprehensive “Operate what you build” culture enabled Netflix to unleash the full potential of its engineering teams, elevating their performance and further solidifying its position as a global technology leader in the entertainment industry.

To tackle the challenges and embrace the spirit of DevOps principles, Netflix adopted the “Operate what you build” approach, fostering shared ownership of the entire SDLC and dismantling silos. This transformative shift allowed the teams developing a system to take full responsibility for its operation and support, encompassing deployment, performance bugs, alerting, capacity planning, and partner support.

Full Cycle Developers

The evolution towards “Full Cycle Developers” emerged as a remarkable model, equipping dev teams with powerful productivity tools and entrusting them with end-to-end SDLC ownership. Netflix supplemented this paradigm shift with continuous training and support through various means, including dev boot camps, to foster skill development among new developers. Streamlining the deployment process, Netflix integrated user-friendly tools like Spinnaker, a Continuous Delivery platform, to enable releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence.

While adopting such models requires a significant mindset shift for teams and developers, the rewards are substantial. To apply this model effectively outside Netflix, organizations can begin by evaluating their specific needs, considering the costs involved, and introducing only the necessary complexities. Embracing a transformative mindset becomes the cornerstone of successfully implementing this approach in any context.

Lessons Enterprises can learn from Netflix’s DevOps Strategy

While Netflix’s DevOps strategy is tailored to their specific work environment, there are valuable lessons to learn and apply in various organizations:

1. Embrace developer empowerment

Allow developers to access the production environment without imposing strict policies, empowering them to make responsible decisions.

2. Value freedom and responsibility

Trust intelligent hires to find their best solutions and balance freedom with accountability.

3. Prioritize innovation velocity

Encourage engineers to develop new features swiftly, delighting customers with reduced time-to-market.

4. Streamline processes and procedures

Eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy to facilitate faster decision-making and maintain agility.

5. Emphasize context over control

Provide teams with relevant business context rather than controlling their every move, fostering a culture of autonomy.

6. Enable diverse technology choices

Allow teams to use their preferred programming languages, libraries, and tools, promoting flexibility and adaptability.

7. Foster collaboration over silos

Promote communication and cooperation between teams, encouraging seamless integration and interdependence.

8. Embrace ownership culture

Encourage the “you build it, you run it” mindset, where teams take responsibility for their own creations.

9. Rely on data-driven decisions

Make informed choices based on data and invest in algorithms and systems that quickly process vast amounts of information.

10. Prioritize customer satisfaction

Keep the focus on enhancing the user experience with every release and aligning efforts with customer needs.

11. Cultivate a DevOps culture

Rather than just implementing DevOps practices, foster a healthy culture that embodies the principles of collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement.

How Netsmartz Can Empower Your DevOps Journey

At Netsmartz, we understand that while Netflix is a DevOps gold standard, not every organization can adopt its culture verbatim. DevOps is a mindset that requires adapting processes and organizational structures to enhance software quality and drive business value continuously. It involves a range of practices, including automation, continuous integration, delivery, deployment, testing, and monitoring.

With our skilled engineering teams at Netsmartz, we are here to help streamline your delivery and deployment pipelines using the right DevOps toolchain and expertise. Our DevOps-managed services aim to accelerate your product life cycle, foster rapid innovation, and achieve optimal business efficiency by delivering high-quality software with reduced time-to-market.

If you’re looking to hire DevOps Azure developers or need top-notch DevOps automation services, Netsmartz is your go-to partner. We tailor our solutions to fit your specific needs, seamlessly integrating DevOps practices into your organization to drive success in the dynamic software development and delivery world.

Harness the power of DevOps to grow your business

Contact us today, ready to build your team your team - your terms..

Hire Global Elite Engineering Talent for your organization.

Kickstart Your Project With Us!

From Inbox to Conversation: Using How to use calling effectively with email and LinkedIn

Mastering the Art of Cold Calling with 7 Free Scripts

How ChatGPT is Transforming Businesses with AI Innovation

How Generative AI is Influencing Vertical SaaS

How to Craft Compelling LinkedIn Connection Requests

Beyond the Connection: How to Follow Up After Connecting on LinkedIn

Let's build your agile team..

Experience Netsmartz for 40 hours - No Cost, No Obligation. Connect With Us Today!

Please fill out the form or send us an email to

• [email protected]

Client Testimonial

Breaking News

Serving 86 million users – devops the netflix way, offering streaming content to 86 million viewers worldwide without hiccups or stutters – that is the challenge netflix faces every day of the week..

This of course puts enormous demands on the organization, and the company is often invited to DevOps conferences to talk about their work. But in fact, hardly anyone at Netflix uses the term DevOps. Its organization is built on the concept of Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) – a way of working which has much in common with DevOps, and was originally developed by Google. We were given the opportunity to talk to Katharina Probst, Engineering Manager for API and Mantis at Netflix.

FROM WIKIPEDIA:

Site reliability engineering.

Site Reliability Engineering was created at Google around 2003 when Ben Treynor was hired to lead a team of seven software engineers to run a production environment. The team was tasked to make Google’s sites run smoothly, efficiently and more reliably.

A site reliability engineer (SRE) will ideally spend up to 50 % of their time doing ”ops”-related work such as issues, on-call, and manual intervention. Since the software system that an SRE oversees is expected to be highly automatic and self-healing, the SRE should spend the other 50 % of their time on development tasks such as new features, scaling or automation. The ideal SRE candidate is a coder who also has operational and systems knowledge and likes to whittle down complex tasks.

DevOps vs SRE

DevOps encompasses automation of manual tasks, continuous integration and continuous delivery. It applies to a wide audience of companies whereas SRE might be considered a subset of DevOps that possesses additional skill sets.

Katharina Probst is Engineering Manager at Netflix where she has worked since 2015. Formerly she worked with software engineering at Google, both as an engineer and a manager.

What is your background and how did you get involved with Netflix?

I come from an academic background but joined the high tech scene a few years after my Ph.D. At Google, I worked as an engineer and manager for several years, where I contributed to various projects, ranging from developer tools to Gmail and Google Compute Engine. A little over a year ago, I joined Netflix, where I lead the API team and an operational insights team. What initially attracted me to Netflix (aside from the people) was the opportunity to work on a very high-scale system that is extremely critical to the business.

DevOps is not a term that I’ve heardused frequently at Google or at Netflix. The Google model of SREs differs from the Netflix model in some significant ways. Essentially, all server teams at Netflix are responsible for their own operations, including 24/7 oncall. However, several centralized teams of engineers build fantastic tooling to make this model feasible. For instance, we have a CI/CD tool called Spinnaker. Spinnaker is also powerful at runtime, not only at deploy time, e.g., it gives easy access to logs and allows for easy rollback of code.

Could you give a summary of the challenges that Netflix has to deal with when providing its services to the world?

Netflix now has more than 86 million users worldwide and runs on more than 1,000 device types. In addition, Netflix runs dozens of A/B tests. All of these dimensions are continuously increasing. The API provides a platform that allows UI teams to write device-specific server-side logic.

The idea is that server-side logic which deals differently with different form factors (e.g., iPhone vs. 40 inch screen TV) or different interaction models (e.g., mobile vs. laptop) has material benefits: developer velocity will be higher as teams can move quickly and independently, and the customer experience will be better because the Netflix experience will be tailored to their device and interaction model. It should not be overlooked, however, that this model leads to increased complexity. The API has seen the number of scripts supplied by device-specific teams increase to more than 1,000.

Meanwhile, Netflix has very high expectations in terms of uptime and reliability. The API in particular is a critical component of the Netflix ecosystem of microservices: if the API is down, nobody can log into Netflix, sign up, search, discover, or start plays. In other words, the Netflix experience is broken.

DevOps principles are, as we understand it, implemented in Netflix both with a strong culture, and a special organization – can you describe these?

Netflix is built upon a culture of freedom and responsibility. This means that every Netflix employee has ample freedom, but with freedom comes responsibility. As a result, we embrace a philosophy of “operate what you build.” We only have a few operationfocused engineers, a core team of SREs. In addition, each engineering team operates their own services, handles their own deployments (and rollbacks, if necessary), and is on 24/7 oncall to deal with any production issues that come up. This does not mean people work non-stop. It does mean that we take turns being available for a call that might come outside of working hours. Each engineer will take a week’s “shift” when their turn comes. Tying this back to freedom and responsibility is straightforward: you have the freedom to own your service’s deployments, but you have the responsibility to make sure that your service is operating properly.

The role of the core SRE team is to have a good understanding of how our ecosystem of microser- vices works together globally. Generally, the SRE team does not get involved for every alert that is fired (e.g., if latencies between my service and another service go up). They do get involved for big, especially customer-visible issues. In such cases, they are on the front-lines along with the engineers responsible for the individual services, and together they address the issue. SREs have a more global picture and will understand better what successful mitigation strategies for the issue at hand might be (e.g., rollback, what other teams should be involved, traffic shifting). Each individual team knows their service(s) best and drive such things as root causing and rollbacks for their own service(s).

From what I understand, Netflix is built upon a microservice-based architecture. Could you tell us a little about it?

Netflix runs hundreds of services. Some are small, some cannot legitimately be called microservices. Many teams own more than one service, but each service is operated by an engineering team. We have dozens, if not hundreds of services that are truly microservices: they solve a specific problem, are wellscoped and well-isolated, and publish a clear API. This works well with our model of “operate what you build.” Teams understand their own services, each service has clearly defined boundaries and runs and scales independently. Unless there are (rare) backward-incompatible changes to a microservice’s API, each microservice owner can evolve the service independently of other teams, thus leading to great developer velocity of independent teams.

The API, at present, is more complex than a typical microservice. It consists of a service layer (code written by the API team), but it also integrates with many other services. In particular, the API has dozens of downstream dependent services to which it sends traffic. In addition, the API loads and runs the server-side scripts mentioned above. Because the API has grown to this complexity level over the years, we recognize the need to break it down into smaller pieces, for the same reason that any company breaks down a large complex system into microservices. One aspect of this is a current effort to move the device-specific server-side scripts out of the API and turn them into their own microservices.

What do you think about the future evolution of DevOps in the world and at Netflix?

Many organizations these days are moving to the cloud, which changes the model ops is done naturally. For a company in the cloud, there’s no longer a need for a specialized hardware ops team that sets up new servers, configures hardware load balancers, etc. But we still need people that are great at operations, and the more complex your application, the more expertise is required. Think about it: if you have a highly complex service with 60 downstream services, all of which could experience problems, say, talking to their persistence layer or having their instances come up, all of this can affect your own service. If you run a thin application server with few downstream dependencies and low traffic, the problem is much less complex.

As more companies embrace microservices, I can imagine a world where the DevOps model of “you operate what you build” becomes more prevalent. At the same time, I believe that for very high scale, very complex systems, deep expertise in operations will always be required. Whether that implies building up a team of dedicated specialists (like SREs) or building this expertise in a team of engineers is a different question, and one that each organization, or sub-organization, will need to figure out for themselves.

Leave a Comment Cancel

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Email Address

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Lean Magazine is published by Softhouse Consulting

Agile inception in 60 minutes, read it, download it, or order a printed copy click on the image below., order printed copies of lean magazine.

How Netflix Utilized Devops to Level Up?

About The Author

Due to its unmatched technological innovation, Netflix, a major player in the entertainment industry, has become a driving force in the IT industry. Netflix has left several leading IT firms in the dust with its single video-streaming platform while showing top-tier engineering, a distinctive culture, and ground-breaking product development. 

DevOps is one of the great approaches, and Netflix is a shining illustration of how it can lead to quick innovation and multiple economic benefits. They have seen nearly faultless uptime thanks to their DevOps culture, accelerated the release of new services to consumers, and seen a significant increase in subscriptions and streaming hours. 

The most popular streaming service in the world, Netflix boasts a staggering 214 million customers spread over 190 nations. 

We'll examine how Netflix naturally created a DevOps automation culture through creative and unorthodox methods in this instructive case study. Netflix ultimately reaped considerable benefits from this paradigm-shifting strategy. 

Netflix’s cloud journey  

In addition to the necessity for better infrastructure, Netflix's migration to the cloud was motivated by a movement toward embracing contemporary technological methods like DevOps services. Because of the 2008 outage, Netflix decided to work with AWS for their DevOps and cloud managed services . 

Instead of doing a simple transfer, they chose to completely redesign their application on the cloud to achieve true cloud nativeness and take advantage of DevOps capabilities. 

Netflix was able to implement a microservices architecture because of this strategy, which improved its scalability, dependability, and overall user experience. By incorporating DevOps services into its transformation, Netflix strengthened its position as the entertainment industry's software innovation leader. 

Continuous delivery was made simple and effective by replacing the prior laborious multi-week hardware provisioning procedures with centralized release coordination. Self-service tools were also introduced because of this transition, enabling product engineering teams to take control of their operations and make choices on their own. 

As a result, Netflix experienced an impressive uptick in creativity and adopted the core principles of the DevOps culture. Notably, their subscriber base increased astonishingly from the prior year by an incredible eightfold, showing the significant impact of these adjustments. 

Additionally, between December 2007 and December 2015, Netflix's monthly streaming hours increased a thousandfold, demonstrating their exceptional success in the entertainment sector. 

Chaos monkey & Simian army: Netflix’s two aces of success

Resiliency was brought about by Netflix's move to the cloud, lowering the likelihood of further disruptions. However, the technical team worked to make sure they could manage any unanticipated mistakes that would pose serious difficulties on the road. 

1. Chaos Monkey  

To improve the security, reliability, and availability of its cloud infrastructure, Netflix adopted a DevOps strategy after realizing the value of frequent failure in preventing bigger catastrophes. 

• Recognizing vulnerable areas where optimization is needed. 
• Progressing with automatic recovery algorithms to complement the development while addressing vulnerabilities. 
• Streaming the text cases when failures occur or under similar conditions. 
• Complementing the issue-resolving procedures consistently. 

2. The Simian Army  

Netflix engineers were motivated to increase their resilience against a wider spectrum of faults and irregularities after their success with Chaos Monkey. As a result, they created the Simian Army, a clever virtual toolkit with unique powers. 

• Latency Monkey  

This dynamic army's first soldier, Latency Monkey, simulates service degradation by adding delays to RESTful client-server communication. This enables Netflix to evaluate how upstream providers will react to certain circumstances and their capacity to do so. 

They can assess the system's viability without physically pulling services offline by simulating total service outage through the use of significant delays. This was especially useful for testing new services since it allowed dependencies to fail without affecting the entire system. 

• Conformity Monkey  

Conformity Monkey, a useful instrument in the Simian Army, relentlessly searches for instances that vary from the most effective procedures and swiftly shuts them down. This move forces the service providers to appropriately relaunch these instances, guaranteeing compliance with best practices. 

• Doctor Monkey  

By using health checks and keeping an eye on external health indicators like CPU load, Doctor Monkey oversees spotting sick models. When the service owners have addressed the main problem, the discovered unhealthy instances are immediately removed from service and terminated. 

• Janitor Monkey  

Janitor Monkey is entrusted with keeping the cloud environment clutter-free, systematically looking for and getting rid of superfluous resources, and making sure that resources are utilized to their full potential. 

• Security Monkey  

A crucial responsibility of Conformity Monkey's Security Monkey division is to spot security flaws or vulnerabilities, such incorrectly configured AWS security groups. Offending instances are swiftly removed to keep the environment secure. Security Monkey further checks the validity of SSL and DRM certificates to guarantee timely renewals as needed. 

Read more about top cloud security trends of future .  

• 10-18 Monkey  

The unique technologies that make up Netflix's Simian Army embody the DevOps tenets of automation, quality control, and business priority. 

10-18 Monkey, an acronym for Localization-Internationalization, was one of these tools, and it was helpful in discovering configuration and runtime difficulties, for instance serving users from different geographical areas and linguistic backgrounds. 

• Chaos Gorilla  

Chaos Gorilla, which replicated the complete outage of an Amazon availability region, was another soldier in this tenacious army. This thoroughly verified the system's capacity to rebalance to operational availability locations without requiring manual assistance or having an obvious effect on users. 

Netflix’s adoption of “Containerization”

Titus (a container management system) worked as Netflix's robust deployment unit and flexible batch task scheduling system. It played a crucial role in the company's decision to increase support for the industry's expanding batch use cases. 

The platform enabled batch users to quickly create complex infrastructure and optimize bigger instances across various workloads by facilitating seamless scaling and effective resource consumption. 

This allowed batch users to streamline their procedures and increase productivity by quickly scheduling locally created code for execution on Titus. Titus had a positive effect on batch processes as well as the service consumers. 

Titus uplifted the game for Netflix, encouraging creativity, effectiveness, and confidence throughout all aspects of their business. Innovative technological solutions may considerably improve the capabilities and performance of a top entertainment platform, as seen by its smooth integration into Netflix's infrastructure. 

Implementation of “Full-cycle Developers” model

The shift to "Full Cycle Developers" has proven to be a fantastic approach, giving development teams access to effective productivity tools, and giving them full ownership of the SDLC. To encourage skill growth among new developers, Netflix supported this paradigm shift with ongoing training and assistance provided through dev boot camps. 

Lessons to learn from Netflix’s DevOps strategy

Although Netflix's DevOps strategy is customized for their particular workplace, there are important lessons to be learned and applied in a variety of organizations: 

• Take advantage of developer empowerment  

Providing developers with access to the production environment without enforcing stringent rules will enable them to take charge of their actions. 

• Value independence & accountability  

Count on smart recruits to come up with the finest ideas and strike a balance between freedom and accountability. 

• Prioritize the quality of innovation  

Encourage developers of new features to create them quickly so that they may please consumers with a shorter time to market. 

• Focusing on context & not control  

Instead of micromanaging every action, provide teams pertinent business context to build an autonomous culture. 

• Widening the range of innovations  

To encourage flexibility and adaptability, teams should utilize their choice programming languages, libraries, and tools. 

• Encourage cooperation over silos  

Encourage smooth integration and interdependence amongst teams by fostering communication and collaboration between them. 

• Adopt an ownership mindset  

Inspire teams to adopt a "you build it, you run it" mentality where they take ownership of their own inventions. 

• Prefer data-driven choices  

Make data-driven decisions and invest in algorithms and systems that can swiftly handle enormous volumes of data. 

• Prioritize your audience  

Keep your attention on improving the user experience with each release and coordinating your efforts with those of your customers. 

• Cultivate a DevOps culture  

Foster a positive culture that upholds the values of cooperation, automation, and continuous improvement rather than merely applying DevOps concepts. 

How VLink Can Empower Your DevOps Journey

DevOps is a philosophy that necessitates changing organizational structures and procedures in order to improve software quality and continually generate economic value. Automation, continuous integration, delivery, deployment, testing, and monitoring are just a few of the activities that are involved. 

While Netflix is a benchmark for DevOps, we at VLink recognize that not every firm can copy its culture exactly. We at VLink are ready to assist you optimize your delivery and deployment processes utilizing the appropriate DevOps toolset and know-how. 

Our DevOps-managed services offer high-quality software with a shorter time-to-market with the goal of accelerating your product life cycle, encouraging quick innovation, and achieving maximum business efficiency.  

We build solutions that meet your business automation requirements and make processes efficient, time-saving, and result-oriented. Our advanced tech stack and developers with innovative mindset can help you develop and deploy paradigms that enable seamless management. 

POST Related Posts

Hiring Java Developers is Vital for Your Tech Startup's Growth

Boost your tech startup's growth with the help of Java developers. Learn why their skills and knowledge are essential for your business success.

10 Top AI Deepfake Detector Tools for 2024 & Beyond

Safeguard your digital content with the top 10 AI deepfake detector tools for 2024 and beyond. Visit our website to discover the latest innovations in protecting against deepfake threats.

Effective Strategies for Recruiting Top IT Talent

Read the blog to understand the meaning and importance of recruitment strategy. Also, explore the top 5 effective strategies for recruiting top IT talent. 

Subscribe to Newsletter

Award-Winning Software Engineering & IT Staffing Company

Get In Touch!

Explore opportunities to deploy best digital solutions.

400+ projects delivered and deployed successfully

450+ experts onboarded with innovative mindset

18+ years of services helping clients to nurture & grow.

98% customer satisfaction rate from global clients.

Have a project? Lets discuss

Please fill in the form and our representative will get back to you.

Upload File

Netflix and Chaos Monkey: A DevOps Case Study

DevOps is a mindset that revolves around adapting processes and organizational structures to prioritize business value, essential software quality attributes, and continuous improvement. While commonly associated with practices like Agile development, automation, and continuous delivery, the essence of DevOps extends to various applications.

A notable case study for DevOps is Netflix, exemplifying a comprehensive understanding of DevOps principles and a commitment to quality attributes through automated processes. DevOps advocates emphasize a keen focus on quality attributes, utilizing automation for consistency and efficiency to meet business needs.

Netflix’s streaming service, operating on Amazon Web Services (AWS), is a complex distributed system with numerous interconnected components. To ensure reliable video streaming across diverse devices, Netflix engineers concentrated on the quality attributes of reliability and robustness for both server- and client-side components. Recognizing that the best way to handle failure is through practice, they embraced DevOps by automating failure.

Users of Netflix software may have observed occasional changes in available video streams without experiencing crashes, errors, or performance degradation. This is attributed to the ‘Chaos Monkey,’ a tool within the Netflix Simian Army series. Chaos Monkey, a continuous script running in all Netflix environments, randomly shuts down server instances. This deliberate introduction of chaos during the development process allows developers to test their software under unexpected failure conditions, fostering the creation of fault-tolerant systems.

The use of Chaos Monkey not only provides a unique testing environment but also encourages developers to design modular, testable, and resilient systems from the outset. DevOps, exemplified by Netflix’s approach, involves altering the development process through automation to establish a system where the behavioral economics favor the production of high-quality software.

In a DevOps organization, leaders must ponder how to incentivize desired outcomes and drive organizational change. Embracing DevOps requires a willingness to make necessary changes and sacrifices, including intentionally causing failures, to set the organization up for success. Netflix credits its ‘chaos testing’ approach for enabling systems to handle the 10% AWS server reboot on 9/25/14 seamlessly. The success of this strategy led to the development of the Simian Army, a suite of tools for chaos testing, now available as open-source software .

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

InfoQ Software Architects' Newsletter

A monthly overview of things you need to know as an architect or aspiring architects.

View an example

We protect your privacy.

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

• English edition
• Chinese edition
• Japanese edition
• French edition

Back to login

Login with:

Don't have an infoq account, helpful links.

• About InfoQ
• InfoQ Editors
• Write for InfoQ
• About C4Media

Choose your language

Discover new ideas and insights from senior practitioners driving change in software. Attend in-person.

Discover transformative insights to level up your software development decisions. Register now with early bird tickets.

Get practical advice from senior developers to navigate your current dev challenges. Register now with early bird tickets.

Level up your software skills by uncovering the emerging trends you should focus on. Register now.

InfoQ Homepage Presentations Beyond DevOps: How Netflix Bridges the Gap

Beyond DevOps: How Netflix Bridges the Gap

Josh Evans uses the Netflix Operations Engineering team as a case study to explore the challenges faced by centralized engineering teams and approaches to addressing those challenges.

Josh Evans is Director of Operations Engineering at Netflix, with experience in e-commerce, playback control services, infrastructure, tools, testing, and operations.

About the conference

Software is Changing the World. QCon empowers software development by facilitating the spread of knowledge and innovation in the developer community. A practitioner-driven conference, QCon is designed for technical team leads, architects, engineering directors, and project managers who influence innovation in their teams.

Recorded at:

Jan 01, 2016

This content is in the DevOps topic

Related topics:.

• QCon San Francisco 2015
• QCon Software Development Conference
• Operations management

Sponsored Content

Related editorial, related sponsored content, popular across infoq, will c++ become a safe language like rust and others, infoq software architecture and design trends report - april 2024, qcon london: meta used monolithic architecture to ship threads in only five months, infoq architecture and design trends in 2024, architecture does not emerge - a conversation with tracy bannon, architecting for high availability in the cloud with cellular architecture.

Cloud Management

Webservers and Virtual Machines

Environments as a Service

Create and Manage Kubernetes Environments

How Is Netflix SO GOOD at DevOps?

Netflix About DevOps

Intro to DevOps

Advantages of DevOps

Netflix DevOps Data & Numbers

How netflix does devops.

Netflix Example Is an Exception

The Netflix Culture

The bunnyshell solution.

Sooo… How does Netflix think about DevOps? Easy! They don’t. The end.

Just kidding, we have prepared an entire article on this topic for you. However, there is a grain of truth in that statement – Netflix doesn’t prioritize DevOps . They don’t get caught up in metrics and goals such as having zero downtime; instead, they prioritize innovation .

No other company in the world innovates at a higher velocity than Netflix, and this approach pays off when it comes to the quality of their service.

The rate at which this entertainment game-changer has adopted new technologies and implemented them into its DevOps approach is setting new standards in IT.

Coman Hamilton , Editor of JAXenter.com

So, how are they so good at DevOps if they don’t think about DevOps? And more importantly, how can you implement the same strategies into your organization? Read on to find out.

Enable High Velocity Development

Breakaway from the inability to quickly deploy isolated environments of any specification.

How Netflix Thinks about DevOps

We have already established that Netflix doesn’t really think about DevOps. So, what do they do then?

They don’t prevent engineers from accessing the production environment in any way (through systems, policies, or procedures) – every Netflix engineer has full access to the production environment from day 1.

This might seem scary for some organizations – giving people full access to everything means they could shut down the service. Yet this has never happened at Netflix. Engineers have the freedom to solve problems in the way they think it’s best and take responsibility for the decisions they make.

They don’t prioritize uptime at all costs , especially if, to achieve 100% uptime, they need to sacrifice innovation.

In industries such as healthcare or banking, zero downtime is mandatory, but not for Netflix. If their engineers can come up with new features and ideas, they have the freedom to implement them even if they affect uptime. In the end, what they gain will far surpass a few minutes of downtime.

They don’t focus on processes and procedures . That’s because it’s difficult for such a large organization to move as quickly if engineers are tied down by specific policies they need to follow. Also, it’s impossible to come up with new approaches if a system dictates the expected outcome and the steps you need to follow to achieve that desired outcome.

They don’t enforce using specific programming languages and frameworks . Instead, they give engineers the freedom to choose the best standard for the job if that means the code is optimized and the users get a better experience.

They don’t believe in gut instincts and traditional thinking but focus on data instead. The majority of the decisions Netflix makes depend upon data.

You can find out more about how Netflix thinks about DevOps in this DevOpsDays Rockies keynote speech.

Short Intro to DevOps

DevOps’ goal is to shorten the development lifecycle and provide consistent delivery of high-quality software by bridging development and IT operations.

The DevOps philosophy builds upon the Agile Principles . You can look at it as a combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases a company’s ability to deliver applications and services faster. At the same time, DevOps enables evolving and improving products quicker than using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.

The Advantages of DevOps

The advantages of this new approach are:

• Speed – DevOps speeds up the release cycle by increasing the frequency of releases
• Efficiency – DevOps seeks to automate workflows wherever possible
• Reliability – DevOps ensures the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes so organizations can reliably deliver continuous updates while maintaining a positive experience for their customers
• Improved collaboration – because DevOps encourages communication and collaboration, it helps teams become more efficient by reducing inefficiencies.

From a technical point of view, Netflix has 3 main components:

• compute and storage, managed through Amazon Web Services
• UI & small assets built using Akamai
• Netflix Open Connect – their purpose-built video CDM.

You can find out more details about their CDM, as well as all their open-source projects and software on Netflix’s GitHub .

Now let’s get into data. Netflix has:

• 100s of microservices
• 1,000s of daily production changes
• 10,000s of virtual instances inside Amazon
• 100,000s of customer interactions per minute
• 1,000,000s of customers
• 1,000,000,000s of time series metrics

And they manage all this with ~70 operations engineers and 0 network ops centers. If that’s not impressive, we don’t know what is.

Schitts Creek Good Job GIF by CBC - Find & Share on GIPHY

A GIF from the CBC

When the entertainment giant switched from delivering DVDs to streaming videos over the internet, there weren’t many tools available that could help the company’s massive cloud infrastructure to run smoothly.

So how does Netflix manage to serve millions of users all over the world with near-perfect uptime? Here’s Netflix’s approach to DevOps:

First, they moved their infrastructure from on-prem to cloud to be able to scale their service, a process that took several years to complete.

Our journey to the cloud at Netflix began in August of 2008, when we experienced a major database corruption and for three days could not ship DVDs to our members. That is when we realized that we had to move away from vertically-scaled single points of failure, like relational databases in our datacentre, towards highly reliable, horizontally-scalable, distributed systems in the cloud.

Yury Izrailevsky , VP, Cloud Computing and Platform Engineering, Netflix

To all the companies that think that building your own infrastructure and tools from scratch is the best approach because no one can do it as good as you – one of the main reasons Netflix is so successful today is because they realized the scalability advantages of cloud early on, and let Amazon handle the heavy-lifting of building the best datacenters. Instead, they focused on their product. Something we at Bunnyshell also encourage and help organizations do through our DevOps automation platform .

In their endless pursuit for scalability, Netflix also implemented containerization . Two key advantages of containerization are:

• consistency between environments
• the fact that containers can be destroyed and created very quickly, which helps with scaling, reliability, and efficient rollbacks.

To further streamline this process, Netflix developed its own container management tool called Titus that could handle their unique requirements.

Titus is Netflix’s infrastructural foundation for container-based applications. Titus provides Netflix scale cluster and resource management as well as container execution with deep Amazon EC2 integration and common Netflix infrastructure enablement.

Andrew Spyker, Andrew Leung, Tim Bozarth , Netflix Technology Blog

Last but not least, Netflix builds for failure . Outages are quite common and, in recent years, we’ve seen many major websites taken down.

On Christmas Eve 2012, Netflix experienced a partial outage to their service (caused by a fault with AWS) that lasted for a few hours. Nowadays, the company can easily cope with these kinds of issues.

How? By accepting that, at some point, parts of their applications won’t work as expected and preparing for these eventualities. For example, they have a tool they call ‘Chaos Monkey,’ which helps them to test the stability of their production applications.

(Chaos Monkey is) A tool that randomly disables our production instances to make sure we can survive this common type of failure without any customer impact. The name comes from the idea of unleashing a wild monkey with a weapon in your data center (or cloud region) to randomly shoot down instances and chew through cables — all the while we continue serving our customers without interruption.

Netflix Technology Blog

Why the Netflix Example Is an Exception

Although Netflix doesn’t deliberately try to be good at DevOps, thanks to their company culture, they still manage to achieve this. However, this situation is unique to their work environment and doesn’t necessarily apply to all organizations.

As we’ve previously mentioned, they intentionally sacrifice some amount of uptime if that means they can provide their customers with a better product in the long run (yet, even so, they have near-perfect uptime). This is not something all companies could trade.

Despite the fact that they are a very data-driven company, they don’t have a single monitor in their offices that shows them their metrics in real-time . Instead, they let algorithms take care of analyzing the data and notify them only if something is wrong. This enables their engineers to focus on what they want to build and don’t waste time trying to make sense of data. Again, this might not be something all companies could do, especially if they have specific metrics at the core of their product.

All in all, Netflix’s approach can work for organizations that give their employees the freedom to do what they’re best at and not for those that have a lot of processes and a heavy structure to get the work done. Netflix believes in context over control, not otherwise.

In the DevOps world, Netflix has been the gold standard for many years; just about as many years as we’ve been using the term ‘DevOps.’ Netflix is different because they don’t just talk DevOps like many companies do while still being too frightened to change. Instead, Netflix embraces changes and constant improvement. 

For example, many companies would be petrified to release something into their production environment that purposely causes systems to break. Not Netflix. Netflix’s ‘Chaos Monkey’ is just one project that proves they’re not afraid to continuously improve. 

Netflix is willing to put its production environment on the line and risk downtime in the short term for a more reliable environment in the long term. 

It takes a certain personality to embrace their ‘no obstacles to production’ approach. Some organizations are simply too scared or lack the expertise to design systems for this approach. Netflix’s strategy isn’t for everyone. To make changes in production as fast as they do requires a lot of upfront automation and systems planning. 

I believe many organizations fail at the Netflix approach because they simply don’t have the engineering muscle that Netflix does. Even though they may want to deliver faster and more efficiently and are even OK with taking on a little more risk, they can’t. They need the team to make it happen.

Adam Bertram, Tech blogger at adamtheautomator.com .

As Coman Hamilton says, Netflix’s approach to DevOps sets a great example of how it can contribute to the growth and development of a business and raises the bar for IT companies everywhere. So, if you’re looking to achieve the same results Netflix has, build a positive culture, and encourage your team members to contribute, you should give Bunnyshell a try.

To help your team:

• we simplified processes and standardized workflows
• we motivate them to follow a systematic approach to the entire infrastructure and other related activities
• enable your engineers to focus on building a great product.

Get in touch with us to learn more about how Bunnyshell makes your work easier.

Related Articles

A Case Study Of Dev Ops At Netflix

DevOps and its advantages

‍ DevOps, which bridges development and operations, is designed to increase the frequency and quality of code releases. In an ideal setup, you should have a high level of confidence when you go live with code releases in a frequent and highly-automated manner.

High automation leads to time and cost savings and greater development efficiency. These benefits are likely to be seen more and more as applications and development teams scale. Having confidence in fast and agile code releases is key to fostering an efficient and mobile development team.

In this article: • I will provide a case study of DevOps at  Netflix • I will be looking at the benefits of growing with cloud-based services, containerisation and building for failure • I’ve chosen to look at Netflix because of the scale at which the company operates and because of their strong technical reputation. They were, for example, early adopters of microservices  • I’ll finish with a short summary of the benefits of building a business that understands and takes advantage of a positive DevOps culture

Leveraging existing cloud services

‍ From its roots as a DVD rental business, Netflix introduced its online streaming offering in 2007. Since then, it has grown to a position where in 2015 the service accounted for over  36% of downstream internet traffic in North America  in 2015. Andin 2017 its users streamed a little over a billion hours of content each week. 

To help handle this scale the company started moving to cloud providers in 2008, a process they finished in January 2016.

“ Our journey to the cloud at Netflix began in August of 2008, when we experienced a major database corruption and for three days could not ship DVDs to our members. That is when we realised that we had to move away from vertically-scaled single points of failure, like relational databases in our datacentre, towards highly reliable, horizontally-scalable, distributed systems in the cloud.” –  Yury Izrailevsky, VP, Cloud Computing and Platform Engineering, Netflix.

You can achieve horizontal scaling by adding more machines to your resource pool, as opposed to scaling vertically where you boost the performance of your existing machines. Horizontal scaling can provide more options to scale dynamically and should reduce the risks of downtime.

As a company that has to handle large amounts of traffic, Netflix points to the scalability advantages of the cloud as one of the key drivers for their decision to migrate. You could build all of these features from scratch. But this would move the focus of your company away from its business needs and towards the inevitable technical challenges, it would have to tackle to scale effectively and reliably.

“Letting Amazon focus on datacentre infrastructure allows our engineers to focus on building and improving our business.” John Ciancutti,Co-founder, 60dB .

Netflix also point towards a certain level of uncertainty around predicted  trends in traffic and uptake in new features . Leveraging existing cloud services with growth plans in place takes the guesswork out of scaling. If a company predicts they are going to grow by 50% over the next six months then they will want to be confident their infrastructure can handle this increased traffic. Short peaks in traffic, where traffic goes up for a brief period of time but then returns to its normal rate, should also be handled. With cloud services this is all taken care of, which means that, because you are less concerned with how you will scale, you can focus instead on building a great product.

‍ Building with containers

‍ Containerisation is a method of abstracting away an applications run time environment so you can run it consistently on different platforms. Containerisation with Docker has become increasingly popular in the past few years. Beyond promoting consistency between environments, a key advantage of containerisation is that containers can be destroyed and created very quickly. This helps with scaling, reliability and efficient rollbacks. In April 2017, Netflix surpassed one million containers launched a week. Scaling with cloud services and containerisation often go hand in hand and there are applications such as Kubernetes which help to automate this process. Netflix have developed their own container management tool called Titus.

“ Titus is Netflix’s infrastructural foundation for container-based applications. Titus provides Netflix scale cluster and resource management as well as container execution with deep Amazon EC2 integration and common Netflix infrastructure enablement. ” – Andrew Spyker, Andrew Leung, Tim Bozarth, Netflix Technology Blog.

Titus’ role is to manage containers. Netflix decided to build their own container management software because of their own unique requirements. They also found themselves in a situation where they were migrating existing cloud applications to a containerised environment. Titus allows existing applications to run without modification in a container. It also integrates with AWS, handles  resources sharing and manages capacity . The application thereby reduces the friction and scaling issues that arise when running an application in a containerised environment.

Building for failure

‍ On Christmas Eve 2012 Netflix experienced a partial outage to their service that lasted a number of hours. The cause of this was a fault wit AWS. 10 In 2014 it was estimated that an hour of  downtime would cost Netflix $200,000  .  More recent AWS outages have seen major websites taken offline. However, Netflix’s platform can now cope with these kinds of issues. ‍

To help prepare for these scenarios, Netflix builds for failure. This means accepting that at some point parts of your applications are likely not to work as expected. With this expectation in place, you can prepare, in the best way possible, for these eventualities.

The ‘Netflix Simian Army’ is part of the company’s efforts to build for failure. For example, they have a tool they call ‘Chaos Monkey’ which helps them to test the stability of their production applications.

“ A tool that randomly disables our production instances to make sure we can survive this common type of failure without any customer impact. The name comes from the idea of unleashing a wild monkey with a weapon in your data centre (or cloud region) to randomly shoot down instances and chew through cables — all the while we continue serving our customers without interruption .” – Netflix Technology Blog.

Teams, working to engineer a solution to protect against potential faults, should be all the more motivated to build a good solution if they know that such problems will be simulated in real production environments. Having control over the timing of these simulations allows you to allocate suitable resources. And by actually simulating the failures that Netflix is building for, the company is able to learn from these experiences and better protect itself against unplanned failures of a similar nature.

Creating a DevOps culture

‍ I’ve looked at some of the practices Netflix promote in their DevOps culture, as well as briefly looking at some of the tools they have developed as a result of this. At its core, a positive DevOps culture should promote frequent releases, high automation and software reliability. Furthermore, it’s advisable to share a high-level understanding of some of the motivations and objectives of a great DevOps culture amongst your larger business team. This will promote the stability and upgradability of applications, and help you to align your development and operations environments with the greater goals of your business as you strive for success in the online world.

Next Blog Post

Social Share

Don't miss the latest from Ensono

Keep up with ensono.

Innovation never stops, and we support you at every stage. From infrastructure-as-a-service advances to upcoming webinars, explore our news here.

Blog Post | March 12, 2024 | Best practices

Transforming Cloud Projects with Agile: A Path to Enhanced Efficiency and Innovation

Gain efficiencies and lower risk with cloud automation.

Blog Post | March 8, 2024 | Inside Ensono

The Other Tech Revolution: How Menopause Awareness and Support are Transforming the Workplace Experience

Start your digital transformation today..

Sequential A/B Testing Keeps the World Streaming Netflix Part 2: Counting Processes

Applying Netflix DevOps Patterns to Windows

Baking Windows with Packer

Lumen: Custom, Self-Service Dashboarding For Netflix

By trent willis, netflix cloud security: detecting credential compromise in aws.

Will Bengtson, Netflix Security Tools and Operations

Credential compromise is an important concern for anyone operating in the cloud. The problem becomes more obvious over time, as organizations…

Netflix SIRT releases Diffy: A Differencing Engine for Digital Forensics in the Cloud

Full Cycle Developers at Netflix — Operate What You Build

Automated Canary Analysis at Netflix with Kayenta

Introducing Winston — Event driven Diagnostic and Remediation Platform

Netflix at aws re:invent 2015, a summary of the topics and how they might be relevant to you and your company.

Ever since AWS started the re:Invent conference, Netflix has actively participated each and every year. This year is no…

SPS: the Pulse of Netflix Streaming

A simple metric that a diverse set of people can comprehend.

• Bahasa Indonesia
• Sign out of AWS Builder ID
• AWS Management Console
• Account Settings
• Billing & Cost Management
• Security Credentials
• AWS Personal Health Dashboard
• Support Center
• Expert Help
• Knowledge Center
• AWS Support Overview
• AWS re:Post

Additional Resources

Get started.

Organizations of all sizes across all industries are transforming their businesses and delivering on their missions every day using AWS. Contact our experts and start your own AWS journey today.

Ending Support for Internet Explorer

DevOps Case Studies: Lessons from the Industry

by Chevas Balloun (Last Updated: April 14th, 2024)

Too Long; Didn't Read:

DevOps accelerates software development with short cycles, frequent deployment, and reliable releases for business success. Case studies showcase significant benefits: 200x more deployments, 24x faster recovery, 3x lower failure rates. Embrace the collaborative culture, tools, and practices – vital for tech industry evolution and profitability.

DevOps is the bomb! It's a mashup of 'development' and 'operations' that's shaking things up in software dev. Think shorter dev cycles, more frequent deployment, and releases that align with business goals.

It's all about blending philosophies, practices, and tools to give your org the power to develop, deliver, and iterate on software like a boss.

As a game-changer in the tech world, DevOps helps companies streamline the systems development life cycle , fostering collab and integrating processes that used to be siloed.

• Deployment Frenzy: Companies using DevOps are freakin' 200 times more prolific with deployments than traditional software dev.
• Bounce Back Quickness: These companies recover from failures a mind-blowing 24 times faster .
• Lower Fail Rates: They experience a threefold decrease in change failure rates, meaning changes stick more often.

This new approach brings measurable gains in efficiency and reliability to the SDLC. Plus, the Enterprisers Project says businesses that rock DevOps are twice as likely to crush it in profitability, market share, and productivity.

By uniting software devs and IT ops, DevOps gives companies the power to deliver software faster, adapting to market changes with less risk. That's why we at Nucamp make sure to weave this mindset into our curriculums.

Table of Contents

Case study 1: amazon's use of devops, case study 2: netflix's devops journey, case study 3: how devops transformed facebook, key takeaways from the case studies, frequently asked questions, check out next:.

Gain insights into the crucial Monitoring and Logging Tools in DevOps to maintain peak health of your systems.

Check this out! Amazon's been killing it with their DevOps game, and it's giving them a serious edge over the competition. There's this sick case study that shows how Amazon Web Services is using DevOps at a massive scale, ensuring their APIs are on point – that's the backbone of their public interface, and it's a big part of why they're crushing it.

Another case study shows that one of their clients doubled their feature deployment rate after implementing DevOps principles.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Amazon's all about automation, ownership, and agility, and it's paying off big time. They're deploying new code like 200 times more frequently than the slackers out there, and their "commit to deploy" process is lightning-fast.

It's all thanks to their next-level continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) setup, which cuts down deployment time and reduces failures like a boss.

Amazon's deployment rate is insane.

They're pushing updates every 11.7 seconds! That's some serious DevOps wizardry right there. Plus, they've got killer tools like AWS CodeDeploy that help them recover from issues lightning-fast, cutting outages related to operational stuff by half.

That's the kind of resilience and monitoring game you need in a massive ecosystem like theirs.

But it's not just about the tech – Amazon's got a full-on DevOps culture going on.

Their CEO, Jeff Bezos, made it a rule that every team has to have comprehensive service interfaces, and that's fueled innovation like crazy. They're constantly pushing out new features and improving the user experience, all thanks to the power of DevOps.

And if you check out these nClouds case studies , you'll see how other companies are transforming with AWS solutions and DevOps too.

Amazon's not just a marketplace – they're pioneers, always staying ahead of the curve and setting the standard for what's possible with DevOps.

Check this out! Netflix's DevOps game is straight fire. They've embraced continuous delivery and automation like no other, making them the OGs of streaming.

From their humble beginnings as a DVD rental service, they've transformed into a global streaming giant, and their investment in DevOps has been the key to their agile evolution.

They even have this dope tool called Chaos Monkey that intentionally messes with their systems to test their reliability.

Talk about confidence in their infrastructure, right? Their DevOps approach has been a game-changer, boosting deployment speeds and recovery times like crazy.

Thanks to their "operate what you build" culture, Netflix's teams can pump out thousands of deployments daily and bounce back from incidents in no time.

It's like they've mastered the art of keeping their cloud-based ecosystem resilient and responsive. Check out these sick highlights:

• High deployment frequency , with multiple updates dropping per day, thanks to their DevOps pipeline.
• Reduced recovery time after disruptions, cuz they're all about resilient ops and quick incident management.
• Cloud-native architecture scaling like a boss, handling millions of users at once and growing like a weed.

Migrating to AWS was a total power move that amplified Netflix's DevOps success.

Their robust infrastructure is built for effortless scalability. During the peak of 2020's first quarter, they handled an influx of nearly 16 million new subscribers like it was nothing.

With a market cap of over $200 billion and a presence in 190+ countries, Netflix's DevOps practices have been the secret sauce behind their meteoric rise.

These guys are innovating at warp speed, constantly pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

By fostering a DevOps culture, Netflix has cemented its status as an entertainment juggernaut and completely disrupted the global media industry. Mad respect for their relentless pursuit of innovation!

Before Facebook got their shit together with this DevOps thing, they were struggling hard with managing their massive scale. But then they embraced the DevOps philosophy , and according to this study by Infosys , it was a total game-changer for them and other tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon.

Here's how it went down:

• Release cycles went from monthly to daily, so new features and bug fixes could be pushed out way faster .
• They brought in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) , which is like a fusion of software engineering and systems admin skills, and it helped them achieve insane 99.999% uptime for Facebook's services.
• With a focus on continuous delivery and automation , they were churning out over 1,000 daily deployments, massively increasing their deployment speed while minimizing disruptions.

But it wasn't just about the technical changes.

The whole culture shift was huge too. As Callibrity points out, having a collaborative environment and attracting top talent is key.

Facebook went from the "Move fast and break things" mentality to "Move fast with stable infrastructure", which helped them stay resilient and accountable. This was clutch when they had that major outage in 2019, and their solid DevOps processes allowed them to recover quickly.

Facebook's DevOps transformation is a prime example of how game-changing this approach can be, aligning with what SmHarter says about productivity redefinition at tech leaders.

Not only did it massively boost their workflow efficiency, but it also created an environment ripe for innovation. Facebook's DevOps model is a blueprint for companies looking to level up their production game and keep up with the ever-increasing service demands.

Companies like Docusign, Forter, Turnitin, and Gengo have really leveled up their game by embracing DevOps, just like the big boys (Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook, anyone?).

Docusign got their testing game on point with application mock tools, mirroring Amazon's focus on automating the crap out of their software delivery process.

Netflix's constant improvement hustle is straight fire, just like Etsy's culture-first approach and Turnitin's proactive database monitoring .

If that ain't enough, Facebook's scalable AF infrastructure is a vibe, just like this financial org case study from nClouds, leveraging AWS to keep up with the growth .

• Automation is the way , not just for deployment but the whole dev process, cutting out human error and boosting efficiency .
• Building a DevOps culture is key, just look at Etsy's hiring tactics, where cross-functional teams stay locked on the same goals .
• Monitoring and observability are game-changers, letting systems like Turnitin adapt and improve based on real-time feedback.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels' famous "You build it, you run it" quote is a straight vibe , showing how accountability and ownership are crucial for high-performance IT delivery .

These practices let you deploy more often and recover faster from outages, showing true DevOps mastery that companies are dying to replicate .

Combine these best practices with case studies and a GitProtect.io guide on backing up your GitHub repos, and you've got a legit playbook for digital transformation through DevOps.

DevOps is the real deal in this fast-paced tech world. The numbers don't lie – companies that rock DevOps see their software game leveling up by a whopping 50% to 63% .

That's straight fire, right? Just peep the 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report if you need receipts.

But that's not all.

DevOps is all about teamwork, automation, and getting that code out there quick. We're talking giants like Amazon seeing a 75% boost in deployment frequency.

And Netflix? They cut global outages by a mind-blowing 99% after embracing DevOps. That's some next-level reliability right there. Check out this mind-boggling stat if you need more convincing.

• Improved Quality: Businesses hit the jackpot with 50% to 63% more successful software drops.
• Faster Deployments: Amazon's deployment game is on fire with a 75% increase in frequency .
• Enhanced Reliability: Netflix ain't playing with a 99% reduction in global outages .

Ignoring these gains is straight up sabotage.

Staying competitive means getting on the DevOps train pronto. Forrester's studies show high-performing DevOps squads pushing code 200% more often with three times fewer failures .

Real talk, DevOps isn't just a nice-to-have; it's a must-have.

"Embrace the collaborative vibe, merge dev and ops, and invest in the right tools" – that's the gospel for any business trying to slay the tech game and dominate the market.

The message is clear: hop on the DevOps journey ASAP. Check out Nucamp's in-depth articles for the details on DevOps essentials and lock down your dev lifecycle.

Make DevOps your co-pilot on this digital transformation trip, and you'll be leveling up productivity, reliability, and efficiency like a pro. Stick to the proven methods, learn from the industry heavyweights, and keep your business agile and resilient in this ever-evolving tech landscape.

What are the significant benefits showcased in DevOps case studies?

The significant benefits showcased in DevOps case studies include organizations being 200 times more prolific in deployments, experiencing 24 times quicker recovery durations from failures, and having a threefold reduction in change failure rates.

How does DevOps impact the software development life cycle?

DevOps harbors measurable gains in both proficiency and dependability within the software development life cycle. Businesses harnessing DevOps have higher likelihood to surpass in profitability, market share, and productive efficiency.

What key lessons can be learned from the Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook DevOps case studies?

Key takeaways include the importance of automation in deployment cycles and software development processes, creating a DevOps-centric culture for shared objectives, and the significance of monitoring and observability for system improvement and adaptability.

How does DevOps contribute to industry success?

DevOps accelerates time to market, maximizes operational performance, and leads to improvements in software deployment quality. Noteworthy successes from industry giants like Amazon and Netflix demonstrate tangible benefits of a rigorous DevOps strategy.

Why is adopting DevOps crucial for businesses?

Businesses implementing DevOps practices see significant improvements in software deployments, deployment frequency, and reliability. Ignoring these gains can put businesses at a competitive disadvantage, making DevOps adoption critical for success in the rapidly evolving market.

You may be interested in the following topics as well:

Master the DevOps toolchain , a set of tools essential for any aspiring DevOps professional.

It's time to embrace automated testing and turn theory into action for your DevOps projects.

Balance excellence with efficiency by selecting the most cost-effective DevOps solutions among AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Discover how synergy in DevOps is not just a buzzword, but a vital aspect of tech success.

Conclude with a deep understanding of Kubernetes in DevOps and why it's become an irreplaceable asset.

Discover how DevOps practices are revolutionizing the tech industry and setting new standards for business infrastructure.

Take a deep dive into DevOps best methods that ensure you're not just keeping up but leading the pack.

Delve into the complex meaning of security within DevOps , unravelling the layers of protection that sustain modern software development.

Discover the intricacies of Development roles and how they can pivot to integrate seamlessly with operations.

Related Blogs

Future of Tech: Exploring Advanced Trends in Back End Technologies, AI, Big Data, and Blockchain

by Chevas Balloun

Navigating Cloud Platforms: Expert Insights into AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud

Mastering DevOps: Key Essentials for Streamlining Your Development and Operations

Optimizing Development: A Comprehensive Guide to CI/CD Best Practices

Decoding the SDLC: A Strategic Guide to the Software Development Life Cycle

Exploring Django: Your Ultimate Guide to Building Dynamic Websites with Django Framework

Flask Uncovered: A Comprehensive Guide to Mastering Web Development with the Flask Framework

Choosing the Best SQL Engine: An In-Depth Look at PostgreSQL and SQL Fundamentals

404 Not found

Anatomy of testing in production: A Netflix original case study

Who is this presentation for?

Prerequisite knowledge, what you'll learn, description.

So you want to test your complex application that involves large-scale distributed systems. But how do you feel about testing it effectively just using your test environment? Today, automated testing of Netflix client and server applications runs at scale in production. Within a few years, the company’s testing has gone from a low-volume manual mode to one where it is continuous, voluminous, and fully automated. Collectively, Netflix teams create hundreds of thousands of tester accounts every day, each being used in thousands of test scenarios, to the point where service providers are more wary of getting paged for causing instability to internal testers than for causing an external outage.

Vasanth Asokan offers a study of the evolution and anatomy of production testing at scale at Netflix, explaining why there was a desire to test in production, what Netflix did to try to keep testing out of production, and where testing belongs, anyway. Along the way, Vasanth shares a few case studies to demonstrate both the benefits and the less tangible diffused impacts of concentrated, uncoordinated testing against customer-facing infrastructure. Vasanth also looks at other forms of testing, such as load, failure, and simulation testing, and explains the role they play in ensuring a fully functioning customer experience.

Join in to learn whether the benefits outweigh the risks of executing untested code in production or whether it’s better to focus on creating a production mirror. If you run large-scale distributed systems, this talk will better inform your overall testing strategy, illustrate specific techniques that work at scale, and provide trade-offs to consider.

Vasanth Asokan

Vasanth Asokan is an Engineering Leader at Netflix, where he heads a developer productivity team for large-scale microservices. Service oriented architectures, continuous integration and delivery, automation, testing, resiliency, serverless trends, developer experience, and education are favorite topics. In a former phase of his career, he focussed on embedded SoC development and EDA tools, compilers, Embedded RTOS -es, and Eclipse plug-in development. He likes exploring vague opportunities, building bridges between ideas and solving problems (both human and technical). Curious by nature and people oriented, he has a high regard for products, processes, and engineering that actually reach people in meaningful ways.

Sponsorship Opportunities

For exhibition and sponsorship opportunities, email [email protected]

Partner Opportunities

For information on trade opportunities with O'Reilly conferences, email [email protected]

View a complete list of O'Reilly Software Architecture contacts

©2019, O'Reilly Media, Inc.  •  (800) 889-8969 or (707) 827-7019  •  Monday-Friday 7:30am-5pm PT  •  All trademarks and registered trademarks appearing on oreilly.com are the property of their respective owners.  •  [email protected]

You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser to improve your experience.

UPDATED 21:04 EDT / APRIL 12 2024

State agency proves DevOps and mainframes can coexist

CASE STUDY by Paul Gillin

Mainframe computing and the modern agile development methodology called DevOps don’t need to be mutually exclusive. The Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles is showing why.

The agency, which services 6.2 million licensed drivers and identification card holders and processed 16.8 million transactions last year, has successfully adopted DevOps and its continuous integration and development processes without abandoning the database management system and high-level programming language that has served it for 30 years.

“Agile gives us a much, much clearer view of what products we want to build,” Joshua Elkins (pictured), a Virginia DMV software developer, said during a presentation earlier this week at the Software AG International User Groups conference in Dublin, Ireland.

Keeping up with the times

Most of the department’s applications are based on Adabas, an inverted list database from 1971, and about 80% were written in the companion Natural programming language, which was launched in 1979. Although cloud-native development is often associated with more contemporary information technology infrastructure, Software AG has continued modernizing Adabas and Natural to keep them in line with cloud-native constructs. The company has said it will support both at least through 2050.

The most recent language version, NaturalOne , integrates with the popular Eclipse development environment and can expose and use applications via application programming interfaces. That enables the DMV to tie into back-end services such as verifying passports, capturing images of driver’s licenses, sharing data with the National Criminal Information Center, and allowing drivers to manage their EZ-Pass accounts. It’s adopting automated testing and mobile-first development.

Elkins said the stability of the mainframe back end has accelerated the shift to DevOps. “We’ve been able to accomplish quite a bit in a short period,” he said. “It’s a lot easier because we have a reliable mainframe on the back end. It’s not often we have to tell customers we can’t help them.”

Virginia DMV’s experience challenges commonly held beliefs that legacy platforms can’t evolve with the times. Software AG has migrated Adabas and Natural to Linux for both on-premises and cloud deployment. Both can run inside software containers, connect to NoSQL and data lake storage and handle streaming data.

“The team has evolved Adabas and Natural for the future,” said Stefan Sigg, Software AG’s chief product officer. “You can stay on your mainframe, migrate to Linux or integrate with your cloud strategy.”

Culture challenge

Elkins said technology has been less of a challenge to reaching the DMV’s agile development goals than culture. When he joined the development organization, he said, “I was 23, and no one else on the team was under age 60. It was a shock to log into a green-screen terminal.”

At the time, application development adhered to the “waterfall” methodology, in which requirements were defined in advance, and developers and business users rarely interacted. In those early days, code often wasn’t delivered for months, and there was little latitude for change once specifications were finalized, Elkins said.

“Prior to moving to agile, we struggled with prioritization,” he said. “Agile gives us a much, much clearer view. It allows for more adaptive planning and has taught us how to negotiate” with the business side.

But shifting to agile “isn’t as easy as you would think,” he noted. “It takes iterative workflows and multidisciplinary teams. It isn’t an A-to-Z path. You have to eliminate siloes and egos.”

Speed dividend

The payoff has come with a faster and more nimble delivery schedule that has cut wait times in DMV offices, increased motorists’ use of self-service website features, and boosted scores on both customer and employee satisfaction surveys.

The development staff has benefited from broader skills and deeper involvement with the business. “Many people are on the path to becoming full-stack developers, whereas before, they would have been app developers alone,” Elkins said.

The initiative has even helped attract recent University of Virginia graduates who might never consider working in a mainframe shop. “Agile has been fantastic because it’s an opportunity for the real experts to sit with those new people,” Elkins said. “It’s collaborative and continuous.”

Don’t be too quick to pull back the covers on the mainframe, he advised. Referring to the cryptic Job Control Language that manages processing on big iron, he said, “You can imagine their reaction when they had to look at JCL.”

Photo: Paul Gillin/SiliconANGLE

A message from john furrier, co-founder of siliconangle:, your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content free., one click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  , join our community on youtube, join the community that includes more than 15,000 #cubealumni experts, including amazon.com ceo andy jassy, dell technologies founder and ceo michael dell, intel ceo pat gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts..

Like Free Content? Subscribe to follow.

LATEST STORIES

OpenAI rolls out upgraded GPT-4 Turbo model to ChatGPT’s premium tiers

Innovating at the edge: Analyzing Google’s AI-driven strategy at Cloud Next

Palo Alto Networks discloses critical vulnerability in its firewall operating system

DuckDuckGo launches privacy-focused subscription with VPN and identity protection

Unpacking Google's data center leap with Arm-based Axion processors

APPS - BY PAUL GILLIN . 13 HOURS AGO

AI - BY MARIA DEUTSCHER . 18 HOURS AGO

AI - BY VICTOR DABRINZE . 18 HOURS AGO

SECURITY - BY MARIA DEUTSCHER . 20 HOURS AGO

SECURITY - BY KYT DOTSON . 22 HOURS AGO

INFRA - BY VICTOR DABRINZE . 23 HOURS AGO