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 of TV

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 Short Years 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

MetadataMovie 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 yumAminator

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


https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Job+DSL+Plugin

https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Job+DSL+Plugin


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


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


https://github.com/Netflix/aminator



How Baking is Different







Traditional:•launch OS•install packages•install app







Generic AMI

Instance








Generic AMI

Instance


Netflix:•launch OS+app







Generic AMI

Instance


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


https://github.com/Netflix/asgard

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 PlatformDiscovery (Eureka)Entrypoints (Edda)

Configuration (Archaius)Zookeeper (Exhibitor)logging (Blitz4j & Honu)

NIWS (Ribbon)GeoBase

Hystrix

Circuit Breakers (Hystrix)Cassandra (Priam &

Astyanax & CassJMeter) Cryptex AKMS

EvCacheZuuli18nL10n

Open Source



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





Thank You !

Email: gbowles@{gmail,netflix}.com

Twitter: @garethbowles

Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/garethbowles


mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.linkedin.com/in/jedberg

http://www.linkedin.com/in/jedberg

Self service build and deployment at Netflix (Agile 2013)

Technology

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