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With a new Planet of the Apes coming out, this may be a touchy subject with our new overlords, but Netflix is using a whole lot more trouble injecting monkeys to test and iteratively harden their systems. We learned previously how Netflix used Chaos Monkey, a tool to test failover handling by continuously failing EC2 nodes. That was just a start. More monkeys have been added to the barrel. Node failure is just one problem in a system. Imagine a problem and you can imagine creating a monkey to test if your system is handling that problem properly. Yury Izrailevsky talks about just this approach in this very interesting post: The Netflix Simian Army.
I know what you are thinking, if monkeys are so great then why has Netflix been down lately. Dmuino addressed this potential embarrassment, putting all fears of cloud inferiority to rest:
Unfortunately we're not running 100% on the cloud today. We're working on it, and we could use more help. The latest outage was caused by a component that still runs in our legacy infrastructure where we have no monkeys :)
To continuously test the resilience of Netflix's system to failures, they've added a number of new monkeys, and even a gorilla:
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