Amazing stuff from Adrian Cockroft at last week's QCon. Faceted object model, lots of Cassandra automation

Netflix's "DependencyCommand", a resiliency system for SOA inter-service network calls, offering builtin support for threadpools, timeouts, retries and graceful failover. Very nice

NetFlix' benchmarks -- impressively detailed. '48, 96, 144 and 288 instances', across 3 EC2 AZs in us-east, successfully scaling linearly

Netflix tech blog on how they deploy their services. Notably, they avoid the Puppet/Chef approach, citing these reasons: 'One is that it eliminates a number of dependencies in the production environment: a master control server, package repository and client scripts on the servers, network permissions to talk to all of these. Another is that it guarantees that what we test in the test environment is the EXACT same thing that is deployed in production; there is very little chance of configuration or other creep/bit rot. Finally, it means that there is no way for people to change or install things in the production environment (this may seem like a really harsh restriction, but if you can build a new AMI fast enough it doesn't really make a difference).'

'For perhaps the first time in the internet’s history, the largest percentage of the net’s traffic is content that is paid for.' A great demo of how *good*, legit, for-pay services, can beat out less usable, dodgy, but free ones (via Waxy)

extensive details on the innards of Netflix' move to AWS, from the legendary Adrian Cockcroft