Netflix Architect Adrian Cockroft at InformationWeek Conference

While attending InformationWeek Conference I had the pleasure of attending Adrian Cockroft's, presentation on his pioneering experience as the Netflix Cloud Architect.  Adrian Cockroft's primary motivator was speed wins in the marketplace.  He also points out that Netflix growth rate was very dramatic and without using a cloud strategy it would have been much more challenging to scale at the rate Netfllix grew.  Netflix strategy was all in on the cloud and this is much easier to do now then back then.  Some recall outages during Netflix growth but Mr. Cockroft points out that datacenter kept breaking Netflix not the cloud and that 80% of outages were data center. Netflix is now made up of 600 micro services so the parts can fail without failing entire system - highly available design

 

What learned at Netflix:

1. How fast can we move -Speed wins in the marketplace
2. Remove friction from product development
3. High trust, low process, no hand-offs between teams
4. Freedom and responsibility culture
5. Don't do your own undifferentiated heavy lifting
6. Use simple patterns automated by tools
7. Deploy as micro services to separate concerns into bounded contexts

Peoples reaction

2009 - "You guys are crazy"

2010 - "What Netflix is doing won't work"

2011 - "It only works for "Unicorns" like Netflix

2012 - "We would like to do that but we can't"

 
Read:
The Phoenix Project
Lean Enterprise

Adrian Cockroft made a very compelling argument that cloud infrastructure and Software as a Service is the future.  Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others will continue to compete for hosting and the prices will continue to decrease as they did recently. Moving IT operation onto the cloud will be more and more compelling and easier to accomplish. 

Source: InformationWeek Conference, Adrian Cockroft's Presentation