Self service build and deployment at Netflix (Agile 2013)

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Self-Service Build & Deployment @Netﬂix
Monday, August 5, 13

• How would your organization be different if all
of your engineers could build, test and deploy
their own code ...
• ... and were responsible for ﬁxing what they
broke at 3am ?

Gareth Bowles

Netﬂix is the world’s leading Internet television
network with more than 36 million members in 40
countries enjoying more than one billion hours ofTV
shows and movies per month, including original
series.
Source: http://ir.netﬂix.com

The Challenge
• We need to innovate rapidly, driven by:
• Global competition
• New connected devices
• Continuous customer feedback
• And we need fast rollback

The Challenge
• We need to scale to cope with:
• Growing customer base
• Peaks in demand:
• Special events: holidays, Oscars
• Daily ﬂuctuations (weekdays vs.
weekends, daytime vs. evening)

Things That Help
• We can push out updates whenever we like
• Company culture

Things That Got in Our Way

A Few ShortYears Ago ...
• Monolithic web app
• Single points of failure
• Releases were done by following runbooks
• DC-based infrastructure
• Different teams used different tools

Meeting the Challenge

http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

Freedom and Responsibility
• Hire mature people who work well with
others
• Give them the context for company success
• Then get out of their way
• But hold them responsible for results

Context, not Control
• Be transparent about what the company needs
to succeed
• Minimize the processes people need to go
through to achieve success
• Value results, not planning and process

Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled
• Clear strategy and goals
• Team interactions focus on strategy, not tactics
• Minimal cross-functional meetings
• Occasional post-mortems to increase
alignment

What This Helped Us Achieve
• DVD to Streaming
• DC to cloud
• US-only to 40-plus countries

Architecture
Credit: Steve Somers

Key Changes
• Service oriented architecture
• Many small teams, each providing their own
interconnected service
• Deploy on Amazon Web Services
• Increased reliance on open source

Highly aligned, loosely coupled
• Services are built by different
teams who work together to
ﬁgure out what each service
will provide.
• The service owner publishes
an API that anyone can use.

What AWS Provides
• Machine Images (AMI)
• Instances (EC2)
• Elastic IPs
• Load Balancers
• Security groups / Autoscaling groups

Freedom and Responsibility
• Developers deploy when
they want
• They also manage their own
capacity and autoscaling
• And ﬁx anything that breaks
at 3am!

Personaliza-‐
Eon
Engine
User
Info
Movie

Metadata
Movie

RaEngs
Similar

Movies
API
Reviews
A/B
Test

Engine
2B
requests

per
day

into
the
Ne3lix

API
12B
outbound

requests
per

day
to
API

dependencies

Build and Deployment

The Audience
• ~700 engineers
• Large majority are developers
• Test engineers
• Delivery teams
• Operations & reliability engineering

Our Goal
• Lower the barriers to build, test and
deployment until the entire process is
accessible to every developer.

The Team
• 11 engineers and 1 director (but we’re hiring !)
• Developers, build / release engineers, DevOps
• Specialize, but understand the full stack
• Service oriented

Self-Service Build & Deployment
• Channel best practices

• Promote, don’t dictate

• Make adoption easy

• Make adoption easy
• Make tools ﬂexible

Building and Deploying
Perforce / Git
libraries
source
Ant targets
Ivy
Groovy all over
snapshot / release
libraries / apps
Jenkins
sync
resolve
buildcompile report
publishtest
Artifactory yum
Aminator
Asgard
rpms

Is That Really Self-Service ?

Common Build Framework
• Deﬁne a build with just a few lines of Ant code
• Templates for libraries and webapps
• Override standard targets if you need to

Jenkins Job DSL
• Define Jenkins build jobs using a domain
specific language (based on Groovy)
• Loop to create multiple jobs (e.g. for building
different branches)
• Make one change and rerun to update all jobs
• The code is the configuration
• https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Job

Jenkins Dynaslaves
• Create build slaves in AWS
• Dedicated slave pools for teams
• Scale slave pools up and down on demand
• https://github.com/Netﬂix-Skunkworks/
dynaslave-plugin

From Build to Deployment

Aminator
• Create (“bake”) AMIs
• Image contains a service and everything needed
to run it
• Can be automatically triggered as a build step
• https://github.com/Netﬂix/aminator

How Baking is Different
https://github.com/Netﬂix/aminator

Traditional:
•launch OS
•install packages
•install app

Generic AMI
Instance
Traditional:
•launch OS
•install packages
•install app

Generic AMI
Instance
Traditional:
•launch OS
•install packages
•install app
Netﬂix:
•launch OS+app

Generic AMI
Instance
Traditional:
•launch OS
•install packages
•install app
Netﬂix:
•launch OS+app
App AMI Instance

Linux Base AMI (CentOS or Ubuntu)
Java (JDK 6 or 7)
Tomcat
Optional
Apache
Monitoring
Log Rotation
to S3
Appdynamics
Machine
Agent
Appdynamics
App Agent
monitoring
Application war ﬁle, base
servlet, platform, interface
jars for dependent
services
GC and
thread
dump
logging
Healthcheck, status
servlets, JMX interface,
Servo autoscale

At Netﬂix, the AMI is the unit of
deployment.

Asgard
• Web UI and REST API for service deployment
and management
• Manage ASGs, ELBs, security groups, ...
• Application -> cluster -> ASG
• Rapid deployment and rollback
• Available to all engineers
• https://github.com/Netﬂix/asgard

Red / Black Deployment

Netﬂix has moved the
granularity from the
instance to the cluster.

Simple Service Setup Effort
• Write the code (variable :-))
• 15 minutes to write a build ﬁle and deﬁne
dependencies
• 15 mins to create a Jenkins build, 2 to 10 mins
to run it
• 5 mins to bake an AMI
• 10 mins to deploy in test, another 10 for prod

Just a quick reminder...
(Some of) Netﬂix is open source:
https://github.com/netﬂix

Why We Open Source
• Give back to Apache license OSS community
• Motivate, retain, hire top engineers
• Beneﬁt from a shared ecosystem
• Make Netﬂix solutions into common standards

The Netﬂix Platform
Discovery (Eureka)
Entrypoints (Edda)
Conﬁguration (Archaius)
Zookeeper (Exhibitor)
logging (Blitz4j & Honu)
NIWS (Ribbon)
Geo
Base
Hystrix
Circuit Breakers (Hystrix)
Cassandra (Priam &
Astyanax & CassJMeter)
Cryptex
AKMS
EvCache
Zuul
i18n
L10n
Open Source

https://github.com/Netﬂix/Cloud-Prize/wiki

ThankYou !
Email: gbowles@{gmail,netﬂix}.com
Twitter: @garethbowles
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/garethbowles

Self service build and deployment at Netflix (Agile 2013)

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