James Higginbotham

API Architect

GlueCon 2013 Notes: Cloud Native Applications: What Changed – Adrian Cockcroft, Cloud Architect at Netflix

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Keynote: Cloud Native Applications: What Changed – Adrian Cockcroft, Cloud Architect at Netflix (@adrianco and @NetflixOSS)

  • We are engineers and strive for perfection, fixing things when they break
  • Perfection takes too long, so we compromise (time to market vs. quality)
  • Time to market wins big (making a land grab, OODA loop)
  • Code features in days instead of months, hardware in minutes instead of weeks, incident response in seconds instead of hours
  • A new engineering challenge: construct a highly agile and highly avail service from ephemeral and often broken components
  • Continuous integration still breaks things, but more often, in smaller increments, and with a faster ability to land grab
  • Recommended books:
  • Developers are now the bottleneck, platform manages service delivery, agility and impl speed wins
  • Examples of cloud native apps: everything Google/Amazon, startup web services, Netflix
  • Case study: Netflix Streaming
    • Cloud native application based on an open platform
    • Use AWS to encode movies, other tasks, but video bits stream from CDN
    • They use AWS, even though Amazon Prime is a competitor – other competitors use AWS also, removes Amazon’s use of AWS as a competitive adv, Prime isn’t impacting their business
    • They aren’t using Google Cloud, yet
      • Huge scale with exposed internal services (didn’t need to build) that have a nice API model and forcing a price war, faster start and per-minute billing
      • But, unproven and only recently out of beta, missing some billing options, and no SSD or huge instances, zone maint windows force zone migrations
      • Price war between AWS and Google help customers of AWS with no vendor change
      • Private cloud prices are increasing
    • Public vs. private cloud
      • Facebook is too big to go public, startups are too small to go private, Netflix is in the grey area and currently fits into AWS
    • The size of the public cloud is doubling every year, doubling the size of the cloud that can be run by AWS customers
    • The choice: build a new datacenter or build the business in some way (new series, new countries)
    • Multiple vendors for CDN (CloudFront is good for gigabits -> Akamai/Limelight terabits -> Netflix Openconnect)
      • Opted to ship hardware CDN equip to ISPs – easy and helps out ISPs by localizing conent
    • Multiple vendors for DNS (Route 53 isn’t robust enough)
      • Built OSS project called Denominator
      • Use regional load balancers and DNS providers to overcome outages
    • Netflix has changed from cost reduction focus to process reduction to speed up developers, become more competitive, generate higher margins
    • Best of breed, by the hour chosen by scale
    • Master copies of data are cloud resident
    • Dynamically provisioned micro-services
    • Services are distributed and ephemeral
    • How to get to cloud native?
      • Freedom and responsibility for developers
      • Decentralize and automate ops activities
      • Integrate DevOps into the business organization (Biz DevOps)
      • DevOps requires a reorg, as does being cloud native
    • Netflix OSS: A cloud native OSS platform
  • Netflix OSS Cloud Prize

 

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