Netflix reveals Eureka, an open source REST-based service that helps it prepare for AWS outages

Nexflix has just revealed Eureka, an open source REST-based service that helps it better handle Amazon Web Services (AWS) outages (aka what caused Instagram to go down).

Previously known as the Netflix discovery service, the company’s tech blog explains in detail exactly why this service was needed, boiling down to the fact that AWS doesn’t offer a middle tier load balancer.

Diving deeper, Netflix explains that the Eureka Server, which also comes with a java-based client component (the Eureka Client), will be primarily used in the AWS cloud “for locating services for the purpose of load balancing and failover of middle-tier servers.” Beyond that, it will be used in the following ways:

• For aiding Netflix Asgard – an open source tool for managing cloud deployments.
• Fast rollback of versions in case of problems avoiding the re-launch of 100’s of instances.
• In rolling pushes, for avoiding propagation of a new version to all instances.
• For our Cassandra deployments to take instances out of traffic for maintenance.
• For our Memcached based Evcache services to identify the list of nodes in the ring.
• For carrying other additional application specific metadata about services.

For consumers, the bottom line is that Netflix is attempting to make itself a more reliable streaming service that is flexible enough to handle any problem AWS can throw at it.

For developers, Eureka is now available on GitHub, and so, if you have a host of middle tier services running in the AWS cloud, you might want to learn more about it via the link below.

➤ Eureka on GitHub

Featured image: Ross Catrow