Netflix open sources tool for making cloud services play nice

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Netflix has forged a cottage industry building tools to fill gaps in Amazon’s cloud infrastructure or otherwise add value to it. Now the company is open sourcing its Hystrix libraries, which manage interactions between the myriad distributed services that power its applications.

Netflix, it seems, is to cloud computing what Google and Facebook are to distributed systems, generally. Today, Netflix has open sourced its latest technology for keeping its cloud-hosted applications running — a set of libraries, called Hystrix, that is designed to manage interactions between the myriad services that comprise the company’s distributed architecture. If you’re building service-oriented architectures in the Amazon Web Services cloud, it might be worth a look…

Netflix Engineer Ben Christensen explained Hystrix thusly in a blog post on Monday:

"Hystrix is a library designed to control the interactions between these distributed services providing greater tolerance of latency and failure. Hystrix does this by isolating points of access between the services, stopping cascading failures across them, and providing fallback options, all of which improve the system’s overall resiliency".

Hystrix actually stems from earlier work to add resilience to the Netflix API, the means by which many customer-facing applications access the services they need to run. As Christensen explained in a February 2012 blog post, services are distributed across thousands of instances in AWS, and if there are problems with those services — such as high latency or failed connections between them — it can wreak havoc on the Netflix API and seriously affect the performance of all the applications that depend on it…

Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/cloud/netflix-open-sources-tool-for-making-cloud-services-play-nice/