Slashdot Mirror
Netflix Open-Sources "Janitor Monkey" AWS Cleanup Tool
Nerval's Lobster writes "Netflix has released 'Janitor Monkey,' an open-source tool for killing old Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances, that began life as an in-house product. While those hosting a private data center will have little use for this scrubbin' simian, those enterprises with a public cloud can add Janitor Monkey to their administrative bag of tricks. The premise behind the tool is a simple one: while AWS allows for easy (and cheap) experimentation, it's easy for even the most diligent IT pro to rack up unnecessary costs when they forget to shut off a particular instance. While Netflix's Asgard tool—open-sourced in June, because this is how the company rolls—allows administrators to delete unused resources, Janitor Monkey takes things one step further by allowing those instances to be automatically found so that Asgard can clean them up. Over the past year, Janitor Monkey has deleted more than 5,000 resources running in the Netflix production and test environments, the company said. Janitor Monkey detects AWS instances, EBS volumes, EBS volume snapshots, and auto-scaling group."
an open-source tool for killing old Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances that began life as an in-house product
This is awesome! My other problem is that I've got a number of AWS instances that did not begin life as in-house products. Will NetFlix release a tool to kill those off as well? Ba-dum-ching! I'll be here all week, folks :)
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/bathroom-monkey/1354961/
I'm rather torn about Netflix. I'm not the biggest fan of their service as I see it as kind of expensive for a low quality rental service. Low quality in terms of their "HD" streams being low bitrate for the resolution they are; unless they changed it I have higher bitrate for my 480p rips to h.264 than their HD stream, because otherwise the quality is diminished.
On the other hand their work on hardening services in the Amazon Cloud is fascinating and the fact they share not just their insights learned from several issues in the Cloud, but also their tools they use to overcome these issues, and now also tools for reducing waste, makes me respect them and consider using the service even though I prefer to license media in the long term.
I'm pretty sure they wanted this name for their new GC implementation for the Firefox JavaScript VM.
Ezekiel 23:20
samzenpus posts a "submission" from one of the Geek.net monkeys which just links to a Slashdot "datacenter" rehash. So the /. front page is just clickbait for more /.?
I had an AWS instance that just wouldn't die. Turns out it had some EBS function on the image that caused the instance to zombie itself and come back from the dead every time I killed it - wouldn't shut off permanently til the EBS thing was killed first. Very annoying.
If Janitor Monkey can do this automatically, it'll save some admins a lot of headaches - and money.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
For those of you wondering, the code is open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license.
You'd think that kind of information would be in the summary, or at the very least the article, but no, you actually have to go and find the repository to find what license it's released under.
Isn't it odd that Netflix runs their streaming service on Amazon's infrastructure, given that they are a streaming video customer competitor?
"Janitor Orangutan will not wear diapers."
How about releasing a Linux client, then you can tell us how cool you are, how you "roll".
...they don't have a client for my Linux.
Thanks for releasing something to the world that someone else might have a use for. Why does your service, which completely defines your company, and uses Linux heavily in it's backend, consider Linux users to be pirates and not allow them to use your product?
I "roll" with other services, like youtube, or hulu, or amazon which allow users to stream to Linux platforms.
How does it determine cruft resources automatically when I can't even tell what's cruft?
I guess you have to work in a datacenter to know what this money business is about.
I don't see why this isn't useful to anyone running dynamic virts; whether on private or public infrastructure. I assume the code as released depends on the Amazon API, but as long as similar functions exist in your private cloud API, it should be possible to adapt the software.