Via the open source monkeys, cloud developers everywhere will have an opportunity to learn how Netflix manages a spike laden business on Amazon’s cloud. In addition to the open source news, the article provides a nice overview of the business problem Netflix is solving, why they went cloud, how open source helps with recruiting talent, and profiles one of their big talents, Adrian Cockcroft.
An excerpt:
“Netflix is getting ready to unleash its Simian Army.
The online movie rental company uses a troupe of cloud software — it calls the programs “monkeys” — that poke and prod its online applications and keep the website and its services humming along.
There’s a Chaos Monkey, a program that randomly kills virtual machines to make sure that small outages will not disrupt the overall system. They’ve got Security Monkey — it looks for configuration and security flaws — and Janitor Monkey, too: It looks for system resources that aren’t being used and shuts them down.
Over the next few months Netflix will release the source code for these programs and more, giving cloud developers a look at how it runs its services on Amazon’s cloud. The plan is “to release pretty much all of our platform, including the Monkey infrastructure, over the rest of this year,” says Adrian Cockcroft, the Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix. “We will be doing bits and pieces of it through the summer and into the fall.””
It’ll be interesting to see if SCOTUS determines if (a) the complexity of the entire law makes it impossible to strike down the mandate; or (b) if the mandate is deemed unconstitutional, thus sinking the entire complicated law.
Is it too complex to fail? Or, too complex to stand?
“The justices focused on the complexity of the law to debate what happens if they find some parts unconstitutional, such as the individual mandate that forces people to buy insurance. Can the rest of it stay, or must it all fall, and the political branches start on health-care reform from scratch? And how could the court practically pick and choose, given the law’s great length and complexity?”
“Perhaps ObamaCare will be remembered as the breaking point for top-down planning. There is not enough information available for the government to micromanage a system as complex as health care, which represents more than 15% of the economy. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek wrote some 50 years ago about the “pretence of knowledge,” meaning the conceit that planners could know enough about complex markets to dictate how they operate. He warned against “the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess.”
“The Internet of Things could have a mind-boggling 24 billion devices connected by 2020 and that means there will be more than three times the amount of connected devices as people on the planet by that time. So, how will the world power all of these gadgets and machine-driven devices? The answer, beyond plugging all of those devices into the grid, will include farming tiny slices of power when available, from sources like the sun, vibrations, mechanical energy, heat and more.”
“…outsources what he calls “run-of-the-mill coding jobs” to India, said there are plenty of positions for enterprise architects, data integration architects, and business analysts. Such jobs include all of the” thinking work” that ends up in code and can’t be done offshore because it requires core understanding of each individual company, Leader said.
Recent college graduates could fill core project management and business analyst positions in IT, he said. Leader himself hired project managers, an enterprise architect and business analysts. Many other jobs, including enterprise and integration architects, require strong skill sets that cannot be filled by students fresh out of college, forcing companies to compete for those applicants. “We cannot find people to fill these jobs,” Leader told CIO Journal.”
“At this very moment, there’s an odds-on chance that someone in your organization is making a poor decision on the basis of information that was enormously expensive to collect.”
This week on Active Information, I highlight a report from the Corporate Executive Board on building organizational capability for Big Data.
My post focuses on human capability, which the Corporate Executive Board refers to as Big Judgment. The data literacy aspect is from a synopsis of Tiffany’s training program.
Believe it or not, the Life & Culture section of the WSJ is expounding on the virtue of data visualization for practical (communication) and aesthetic purposes:
At companies and universities, and far beyond, the goal of data-driven digital artists is clear, not cynical: convey complex concepts quickly and crisply. They want to generate not Art-with-a-capital-A, necessarily, but understanding. They take stone-cold data—units of information—and turn them into something warmly communicative. Beautiful, too.
Related, I recently watched a good TED Talk by David McCandless on the Beauty of Data Visualization:
After watching, I picked up McCandless’ Visual Miscellaneum, not because I have any interest in miscellany. Rather, I wanted to see the different mechanisms, formats and patterns used to bring that data to life.
The WSJ has a new CIO Journal. The first few days were predictable, but this guest article by Irving WB has me looking forward to true CIO level content.
Try plotting your CIO and/or IT org in the 2 x 2 matrix that Wladawsky-Berger describes: Internal & Operational, Internal & Strategic, External & Operational, External & Strategic.
“To discuss something as complex as the evolving role of the CIO, I would like to offer a simple and hopefully comprehensive framework based primarily on my own experience working with CIOs over the past several decades, as well as on various excellent studies on the future of the CIO.
Two major dimensions stand out along which to develop such a framework. One dimension focuses on whether the activities are more operational versus strategic, that is, oriented more toward the near term or the longer term. The second dimension focuses on whether the activities are more internal versus external, that is, primarily aimed at supporting the business functions or at growing the business in the marketplace.
While each of these dimensions is more of a continuous spectrum than just two discrete roles, it is helpful to discuss each of the four roles resulting from such a 2 x 2 framework.”
