The automation axis demonstrates a company's ability to manage, operate, optimize, secure, and predict how their systems are behaving to ensure a positive customer experience. Netflix understood early on in their cloud journey that they had to develop new ways to verify that their systems were operating at the highest level of performance, and almost more importantly, that their systems were resilient to service faults of all kinds. They created a suite of tools called the Simian Army (https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/the-netflix-simian-army-16e57fbab116), which includes all kinds of automation that is used to identify bottlenecks, break points, and many other types of issues that would disrupt their operations for customers. One of the original tools and the inspiration for the entire Simian Army suite is their Chaos Monkey; in their words:
Having systems that can survive randomly shutting down critical services is the definition of high levels of automation. This means that the entire landscape of systems must follow strict automated processes, including environment management, configuration, deployments, monitoring, compliance, optimization, and even predictive analytics. Chaos Monkey went on to inspire many other tools that all fall into the Simian Army toolset. The full suite of the Simian Army is:
- Latency Monkey: Induces artificial delays into RESTful calls to similar service degradation
- Conformity Monkey: Finds instances that do not adhere to predefined best practices and shuts them down
- Doctor Monkey: Taps into health checks that run on an instance to monitor external signs of health
- Janitor Monkey: Searches for unused resources and disposes of them
- Security Monkey: Finds security violations and vulnerabilities and terminates offending instances
- 10-18 Monkey: Detects configuration and runtime problems in specific geographic regions
- Chaos Gorilla: Similar to Chaos Monkey, but simulates an entire outage of AWS available zones
However, they didn't stop there. They also created a cloud wide telemetry and monitoring platform known as Atlas (https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/introducing-atlas-netflixs-primary-telemetry-platform-bd31f4d8ed9a), which is responsible of capturing all-time series data. The primary goal for Atlas is to support queries over dimensional time series data so they can drill down into problems as quickly as possible. This tool satisfies the logging aspect of the twelve-factor app design, and allows them to have enormous amounts of data and events to analyze and take action on before they become customer-impacting. In addition to Atlas, in 2015 Netflix released a tool called Spinnaker (https://www.spinnaker.io/), which is an open source, multi-cloud, continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence. Netflix is constantly updating and releasing additional automation tools that help them manage, deploy, and monitor all their services, using globally distributed AWS regions and, in some cases, using other cloud vendor services.
Netflix has been automating everything in their environment for almost as long as they have been migrating workloads to the cloud. Today, they rely on those tools to ensure their global network is functioning properly and serving their customers. Therefore, they would fall on the highly mature level of the automation axis.