Why did Netflix retire the Simian Army project?

[Marcus Kim]

Hi, 

I'm doing a case study on Netflix for school. I just wanted to know why Netflix retired the Simian Army. If so, I was wondering where all the functionality went and if they are still using chaos engineering.

Also, if anyone can tell me how fast Netflix's deployment cycles are and what tools they use in their pipeline, you would be the best person in the world in every respect.

Marcus

[Ed Bukoski]

Marcus -- the short answer is included in the readme.md for Simian Army:

• Chaos Monkey is now standalone
• Janitor Monkey is replaced with Swabbie
• Conformity Monkey and auditing services like it have moved directly into Spinnaker

Slightly longer answer: all software has a lifecycle and it was time to evolve the core ideas of Simian Army to match the changing needs of Netflix's environment.  The most obvious first step was to separate out the services so that they could evolve independently.  By separating them it also enabled each to use different technologies and deployment models, for example embedding Conformity Monkey functionality directly into Spinnaker provides teams feedback in the same UI they do deployments, increasing the visibility of violations while enabling the ability to surface corrective actions.

We have an older blog post of how we build code at Netflix.  Although it is from 2016 it still fundamentally represents the way we deploy code for many services.  The biggest change since 2016 is the impact of containers in our code-build-deploy pipeline.  

Hope this helps with your research.

Thanks,

Ed.

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[Marcus Kim]

Ed, 

Thank you so much! This helps so much.

Marcus

On Oct 10, 2019, at 3:18 PM, 'Ed Bukoski' via Simian Army Users <simianar...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



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[Ed Bukoski]

Marcus -- also check out the Chaos Monkey 2.0 article.  

It is a good read on the evolution of Chaos Engineering and describes new features (like Spinnaker integration and per-app configuration) that weren't possible in the old Simian Army version of Chaos Monkey.

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[Marcus Kim]

Awesome thanks, Ed,

Finished my report already but I might check it out later if my group mates don’t think I have enough detail! 

Marcus

Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 10, 2019, at 9:01 PM, Marcus Kim <marcus...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ed,