Top all-time · #115
Netflix TechBlog
Company blog · techblog.netflix.comsystemsprogramming
Netflix TechBlog is the company blog at techblog.netflix.com, writing about systems and programming. Since 2010, 360 different Hacker News readers have linked it 567 times, most often “Chaos Monkey released into the wild”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 7 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Netflix's TechBlog for engineering posts on cloud resilience, such as the Chaos Monkey and Simian Army tooling, plus AWS architecture, streaming and infrastructure write-ups.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Chaos Monkey released into the wild21 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2012-07-30
- The Netflix Simian Army15 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2011-07-19
- Netflix launches a tech blog15 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2010-12-02
- Benchmarking Cassandra Scalability on AWS - Over a million writes per second10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2011-11-03
- Netflix Recommendations: Beyond the 5 stars8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2012-04-07
- Linux Performance Analysis8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2015-11-30
- Lessons Netflix Learned from the AWS Outage8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2011-04-29
- Netflix: Lessons We’ve Learned Using AWS8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2010-12-16
- Netflix releases VMAF video quality metric6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-06-06
- Introducing Atlas: Netflix's Primary Telemetry Platform6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2014-12-12
What Hacker News says?
Chaos gorilla is a thing as well, simulates outage of an entire AZ. http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/07/netflix-simian-army.html
Comment linking /2011/07/netflix-simian-army.html
on “Summary of the Amazon S3 Service Disruption”Submitted Node.js in Flame Graphs as a story · 778 points
HN discussionhttp://techblog.netflix.com/2011/07/netflix-simian-army.html > Chaos Gorilla is similar to Chaos Monkey, but simulates an outage of an entire Amazon availability zone. We want to verify that our services automatically re-balance to the functional availability zones without user-visible impact or manual intervention.
Comment linking /2011/07/netflix-simian-army.html
on “Summary of the Amazon S3 Service Disruption”Submitted How We Build Code at Netflix as a story · 624 points
HN discussionNo, Chaos Gorilla is similar to Chaos Monkey, but simulates an outage of an entire Amazon availability zone http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/07/netflix-simian-army.html
Comment linking /2011/07/netflix-simian-army.html
on “Summary of the Amazon S3 Service Disruption”Submitted Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix as a story · 537 points
HN discussionHere are some recent ones that have been popular: http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/4/20/how-twitter-handle... https://redditblog.com/2017/1/17/caching-at-reddit/ https://blog.twitter.com/2017/the-infrastructure-behind-twit... https://www.netlify.com/blog/2017/03/16/smashing-magazine-ju... https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/03/stack-overflow-a-tech... https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/10/instant-messag.…
Comment linking /2016/08/building-fastcom.html
on “How We Built r/Place”Submitted Introducing Netflix Stethoscope as a story · 497 points
HN discussionI've been thinking a lot about my personal dependencies, and how I can mitigate points of failure. The mental exercise I've been going through is basically imagining Netflix's Chaos Monkey [1] running loose on my life. How can I be resiliant to data loss? Job loss? Cognitive loss? There are ways I can mitigate these risks, and some ways I can test to see if my mitigation strategies will work in practice. But how do…
Comment linking /2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-into-wild.html
on “Don’t Mess with The Google”Submitted Linux Performance Analysis as a story · 451 points
HN discussionAnd everyone made fun of Netflix for implementing a secure protocol on top of http. Suddenly that seems really useful for people in Kazakhstan. http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/10/message-security-layer-m... https://github.com/Netflix/msl
Comment linking /2014/10/message-security-layer-modern-take-on.html
on “Kazakhstan to MitM all HTTPS traffic starting Jan 1”Submitted Netflix Releases Falcor Developer Preview as a story · 438 points
HN discussionThe best example so far regarding fault tolerance. The Netflix Simian Army. Introduce failures constantly! http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/07/netflix-simian-army.html
Comment linking /2011/07/netflix-simian-army.html
on “Post-Mortem for Google Compute Engine’s Global Outage on April 11”Submitted Building fast.com as a story · 432 points
HN discussionThe motivation part starts around 8:30. It's hard to claim complete objectivity when it comes to things like this but it sounds particularly unconvincing to me. Node.js' sweetspot is providing an easy route to server development for front-end developers and it seems this is roughly what happened. It's not a huge step for Netflix that already has an API approach that is very UI centric as outlined here http://techblo…
Comment linking /2013/01/optimizing-netflix-api.html
on “Node.js in Flame Graphs”Submitted Crafting a high-performance TV user interface using React as a story · 389 points
HN discussionNetflix very publicly went all AWS a couple of years ago: http://techblog.netflix.com/search/label/AWS .
Comment linking /search/label/AWS
on “Verizon's accidental mea culpa”Submitted John Carmack on Developing the Netflix App for Oculus as a story · 345 points
HN discussionThis whole area is a little murky but I want to point out that Netflix has supported HTML5 video for a while: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742 . Using EME no less ( http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/12/html5-video-is-now-suppo... ) I was mostly trying to point out that the previous comment was referring to Flash and Silverlight as if they weren't fading/phased out technologies (which they are as I understood it…
Comment linking /2015/12/html5-video-is-now-supported-in-firefox.html
on “Save Firefox”Submitted Vizceral Open Source as a story · 301 points
HN discussionRelated, "Linux Performance Analysis in 60,000 Milliseconds": http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/11/linux-performance-analys...
Comment linking /2015/11/linux-performance-analysis-in-60s.html
on “I usually run 'w' first when troubleshooting unknown machines”Submitted Outlier Detection at Netflix as a story · 274 points
HN discussionHashiCorp also has a pretty complete solution called Atlas : https://www.hashicorp.com/ ( different from the Netflix Atlas http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/12/introducing-atlas-netfli... ) Joyent's Triton looks cool: https://www.joyent.com/ as does CoreOS's Tectonic (built on top of k8s): https://tectonic.com/
Comment linking /2014/12/introducing-atlas-netflixs-primary.html
on “How We Build Code at Netflix”Submitted Netflix Chaos Monkey Upgraded as a story · 271 points
HN discussionIsn't Netflix using Mesos (see http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/08/fenzo-oss-scheduler-for-... )? I don't understand what role it plays here.
Comment linking /2015/08/fenzo-oss-scheduler-for-apache-mesos.html
on “How We Build Code at Netflix”Submitted Netflix: Lessons We’ve Learned Using AWS as a story · 256 points
HN discussionA combination of things such as Spinnaker providing granular environmental context to an instance by way of user data (things that the ec2 metadata service doesn't readily provide to an instance without API calls), dynamic properties which can be controlled down to the instance-level ( http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/06/annoucing-archaius-dynam... ), and other solutions depending on a team's needs.
Comment linking /2012/06/annoucing-archaius-dynamic-properties.html
on “How We Build Code at Netflix”Submitted Chaos Monkey released into the wild as a story · 235 points
HN discussionImmutable infrastructure is the future and it seems that even Netflix is planning to use containers for that: "Containers provide an interesting potential solution to the last two challenges and we are exploring how containers can help improve our current build, bake, and deploy experience." I think that the future of deployments means that it is closely integrated with your source code management. Every new push bu…
Comment linking /2015/11/global-continuous-delivery-with.html
on “How We Build Code at Netflix”Submitted Python at Netflix as a story · 232 points
HN discussion
