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.””

via Netflix to Open Source Army of Cloud Monkeys | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.