Netflix open sources dynamic query goodness for Amazon cloud

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

 Netflix is putting Edda, aka Entrypoints, its tool for rapidly querying and reporting on Amazon Web Services resources, onto Github so other AWS customers can apply it to their own workloads, according to a company blog post.

Video streaming giant Netflix, which has become something of an Amazon Web Services whisperer, is open sourcing code for a dynamic querying tool that can help engineers “learn the stories” of their AWS cloud deployments, according to a Netflix blog post. The tool, called Edda (known internally as Entrypoints), can poll a company’s cloud resources using APIs and record the results…

That’s handy to have in a world of quickly shifting virtual machines. Importantly, Edda augments the information that engineers get from AWS itself, which Netflix Engineer Cory Bennett characterized as fast and efficient but limited. With the AWS APIs alone, for example, “there is no way to find an instance by the hostname, or find all instances in a specific Availability Zone without first fetching all the instances and iterating through them,” Bennett wrote.

Edda gives its users a window into the kinds of historical information about their resources that Amazon’s own APIs don’t provide, by handling each resource as versioned documents “that can be recalled via the REST APIs.”…

Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/cloud/netflix-open-sources-dynamic-query-goodness-for-amazon-cloud/