SE Radio 216: Adrian Cockcroft on the Modern Cloud-based Platform

Venue: Internet
Adrian Cockcroft discusses the challenges in creating a dynamic, flexible, cloud-based platform with SE Radio host Stefan Tilkov. After briefly discussing the definition of “cloud computing,” Adrian explains the history behind Netflix’s move to the cloud (which he led). After highlighting some of the differences that have developers and architects must face, Adrian talks about lessons for other kinds of companies and industries. Microservices and microservices architecture are a hot topic and Netflix is one of the more well-known references. The discussion covers this and the implications of such an approach as well as the technical means used to implement such an approach — the various open-source libraries provided by Netflix as well as the underlying Amazon platform. Next, Adrian explains the reasoning behind open-sourcing so many internal products in the first place, and how others might benefit from it (providing some examples of companies that already do so). Stefan and Adrian also talk about vendor lock-in, finding the right cloud strategy depending on your requirements, future directions and expectations, and Adrian’s new role at VC company Battery Ventures, and finally Adrian provides some hints as to how listeners might go about familiarizing themselves with this new type of architecture.

Adrian Cockcroft is a Technology Fellow at Battery Ventures, and served as a Chief Architect and Director of Web Engineering at Netflix, Inc. At Netflix, Adrian was responsible for research and development of scalable personalized web architectures, and led Netflix’s efforts to move to a fully cloud-based architecture. Prior to Netflix, Adrian worked for eBay, where he was a founding member of eBay Research Labs. Prior to eBay, he spent 16 years at Sun Microsystems, became a Distinguished Engineer in 1999, and served as Chief Architect and Product Boss for Sun’s High Performance Technical Computing business Unit. He is best known as the author of four books including Sun Performance and Tuning, and is a well-known speaker at international conferences.

Show Notes

Related Links

• Adrian’s Book on Sun Performance Tuning: http://www.amazon.com/Sun-Performance-Tuning-Java-Internet/dp/0130952494/
• The chaos monkey and the simian army: http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/07/netflix-simian-army.html
• Microservices: http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html
• Amazon ELB: http://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/
• Eureka: https://github.com/Netflix/eureka
• Ribbon: https://github.com/Netflix/ribbon
• Karyon: https://github.com/Netflix/karyon
• Route 53: http://aws.amazon.com/route53/
• The CAP Theorem: http://www.infoq.com/articles/cap-twelve-years-later-how-the-rules-have-changed
• Michael Nygard’s “Release It!” http://www.amazon.com/Release-It-Production-Ready-Pragmatic-Programmers/dp/0978739213
• Hystrix: https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix
• Pets vs. Cattle, originally by Bill Baker, as per http://www.slideshare.net/randybias/architectures-for-open-and-scalable-clouds (slide 20)
• Bounded Context concept from Domain Driven Design (DDD): http://martinfowler.com/bliki/BoundedContext.html
• Netflix Open Source Home: http://netflix.github.io
• Netflix Scumblr: https://github.com/Netflix/Scumblr
• Docker: https://www.docker.com
• BlueJeans http://bluejeans.com
• Security Monkey: https://github.com/Netflix/security_monkey