Netflix Offers More Open Source Goodness with Asgard Cloud Deployment Tool

Posted by on Jun 27, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

Neflix announced it was open sourcing yet another of its IT management tools. This time it’s Asgard, a web-based cloud management tool designed for deploying massive cloud code projects on Amazon Web Services. Netflix released the project this week to GitHub and offered it under the Apache 2.0 open source license. They invited anyone to fork the project and make improvements to it. As an IT pro, you have to love the Netflix largess. Joe Sondow, and engineer at Netflix, explained the company’s rationale in open sourcing these tools: “Asgard has been one of the primary tools...

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Facebook Joins Netflix in Helping ISPs Deliver Content Efficiently

Posted by on Jun 22, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

GigaOm reported today that Facebook has plans to deploy servers inside ISP data centers to help deliver its growing collection of photos and other future services. This is similar to an announcement from Netflix we covered in this blog earlier this month. Netflix announced it was building open source servers, which ISPs could install in their data centers to help them deal with traffic volume from Netflix. Similarly, Facebook plans to build edge servers, which can help deal with traffic to its growing picture collection, which is only likely to get bigger with its purchase of Instagram in...

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NGINX Exec Talks about Netflix CDN Open Server Deal

Posted by on Jun 8, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

The other day we wrote about the new Netflix initiative to build its own Content Delivery Network with open source server designs and software. NGINX, a company based in Russia, is the Netflix’s server vendor for this project — and I talked to Andrey Alexeev, who is in charge of business development at NGINX about the deal. NGINX makes highly scalable Internet servers, and that’s one of the reasons Netflix came calling. In fact, my colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reported earlier this year that NGINIX (which Vaughan-Nichols writes is pronounced Engine-X) is the number...

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Netflix to Open Source “Monkey” Website Fault Testing Tools

Posted by on Apr 18, 2012 in Blog | 2 comments

Netflix, perhaps more than any other web service must keep going, even when it has ridiculous traffic. To that end, it uses Amazon Web Services to allow for elastic coverage, but it also tests its systems regularly with a set of tools it refers to as monkeys — and according to Wired, it intends to open source the whole kit and kaboodle over the next year. In a post last July on the Netflix blog, it discussed the idea behind the monkey tools. As a cloud-based vendor, Netflix understands that the cloud provides redundancy and fault-tolerance, but it also wants to be able to survive any...

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Government Agency Built From Ground Up with Open Source

Posted by on Apr 10, 2012 in Blog | 5 comments

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had the distinct advantage of being able to build its systems from scratch, having been established by a 2010 law. One of the advantages it has had over other government agencies making the transition to more modern systems was the fact it was entirely unencumbered by legacy systems. As such, it took advantage of that flexibility to build open systems built on open source software that could grow with the agency over time. So writes, agency acting deputy chief information officer, Matthew Burton, in a recent O’Reilly Radar guest post. In fact,...

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