Author: Barb Darrow
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It’s great that there are a ton of open source projects available for the taking, but checking them out and trying to get a feel for how they’ll work out can be tricky for newbies (and even for some more grizzled veterans.)
That’s why the Netflix engineering brain trust rolled out ZeroToDocker last week –which promises to make it much easier for shop to test out say Asgard, Netflix’s cloud deployment tool, in a limited setting before deploying it at scale. Basically, ZeroToDocker lets you (provided you have a Docker host) run a single node of an NetflixOSS project with a one (1!) single command. Easy peasy.
“Once the images are downloaded it’s Docker run, Docker run, Docker run with one parameter a piece and you don’t need to understand much about it to get it running,” Andrew Spyker, senior software engineer who joined Netflix from IBM not that long ago tells us.
Our other guest, Ruslan Meshenberg, director of cloud platform engineering also talks about why Netflix is all fired up about open-sourcing the technologies it builds to augment Amazon Web Services. Netflix is, after all, in the video streaming business.
Meshenberg acknowledges that Netflix OSS has no impact on the Netflix P&L but it is helpful all the same. “We want to validate what we’re doing against the community. We don’t want to be that unicorn stuck in a cul de sac, if you will. It’s good to have external validation that we’re not creating one-offs that we then have to maintain,” he said.
And that OSS goodness makes it easier for Netflix to hire top engineering talent in the valley where it is a white-hot commodity.
Oh, and it also gives Netflix a leg up on hiring top engineering talent, which pretty much is all about open-source.
But before we get to all the Netflix/AWS goodness, Derrick Harris talks about all the action from Google, Stanford University, Microsoft and others heating up the neural network sector; and we discuss the latest Microsoft Azure stumble. (Oh, since it’s been a few sentences since I mentioned Docker, we’ll also touch on the fact that people — if they are so disposed — can now run Docker instances from their Windows desktops.)
So get comfy and have a listen.