Dystopia as a Service

We have spent years striving to build perfect apps running on perfect kernels on perfect CPUs connected by perfect networks, but this utopia hasn't really arrived. Instead we live in a dystopian world of buggy apps changing several times a day running on JVMs running on an old version of Linux running on Xen running on something I can't see, that only exists for a few hours, connected by a network of unknown topology and operated by many layers of automation. I will discuss the new challenges and demands of living in this dystopian world of cloud-based services. I will also give an overview of the Netflix open source cloud platform (see netflix.github.com) that we use to create our own island of utopian agility and availability regardless of what is going on underneath.

Adrian is the Director of Architecture for the Cloud Systems team at Netflix, and is leading the Netflix Open Source Software program and the Cloud Prize. Before joining Netflix in 2007, Adrian was a founding member of eBay Research Labs. He spent 16 years at Sun Microsystems, including a stint as Distinguished Engineer and chief architect for Sun's High Performance Technical Computing group. Adrian authored two editions of Sun Performance and Tuning: Java and the Internet; and co-authored two Sun Blueprint books, Resource Management and Capacity Planning for Internet Services.