Friday, May 24, 2013

If it's broke, don't fix it

Saul Caganoff writes Netflix: Dystopia as a Service on Adrian Cockroft keynote describing Netflix's seemingly impossible infrastructure. The opening:

"As engineers we strive for perfection; to obtain perfect code running on perfect hardware, all perfectly operated." This is the opening from Adrian Cockroft, Cloud Architect at Netflix in his recent Keynote Address at Collaboration Summit 2013. Cockroft continues that the Utopia of perfection takes too long, that time to market trumps quality and so we compromise. But rather than lamenting the loss of "static, better, cheaper" perfection, Cockroft describes how the Netflix "Cloud Native" architecture embraces the Dystopia of "broken and inefficient" to deliver "sooner" and "dynamic". Cockroft says that "the new engineering challenge is not to construct perfection but to construct highly agile and highly available services from ephemeral and often broken components."

Were I looking for a new challenge, as interesting as Google is, I'd go to Netflix—unless I got to work on asteroid mining!


Do you read the Netflix Tech Blog — why not?

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