Flux: A New Approach to System Intuition | Hacker News Reader

Flux: A New Approach to System Intuition

techblog.netflix.com

154 points_jomo33 comments

Is it just me or has the Netflix engineering team really been cranking out good stuff as of recent times? I mean holy crap. This thing feels so futuristic just watching it. I can't begin to express how blown away I am.

Given how crazy creative the netflix team is, it's not a stretch to imagine their next hackathon. Put this on a big screen and sit in front of it. Throw in a few hazard lights and a siren and music that plays automatically the moment there's a failure and it's a done deal.

Side note: If you want to get a better understanding of what you are reading, the inline linked article[1] is a must read

Also, I actually thought the pain suit was a real thing for a moment. Well played Netflix. Well played.

[1]http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/09/chaos-engineering-upgrad...

For those reading comments first and hoping a title like this means Netflix is finally doing something decent in the way suggestions and not showing the same move/show on multiple sliders on the same page. I.e. it's now got better intuition.. you'll be disappointed.

If your looking for really fancy Netflix network infrastructure stuff, dive right in! They are great at this stuff :-D

Reminds me of Logstalgia, which was a cool log visualization tool for its time - http://logstalgia.io/

Never had heard of that, thanks!

EDIT: apparently, by the author of Gource(http://gource.io/). That one I had used before.

I want this NOW. Anyone know if they are planning on open-sourcing this project?

I'd be surprised if they did. This seems pretty specific to their kind of high volume traffic business. And to their distributed nature of data and latency management etc. Not sure how applicable it will be to other businesses.

That said, since it is at its core a logging tool of sorts, it's possible that it's decoupled enough to put it out. But that's really stretching it.

Uh...you realize the visualization is probably the easiest part of this tool? Getting realtime insight into your network is the much harder problem, and you will need to implement that all yourself.

Unless you're starting from the ground up...

For a moment there I thought the "pain" suit was real- as it reminded me of this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_se...

A more humane, non-painful version of the suit may be entirely possible!

Nice! A few years ago I made a little program like this, called packet flight, to visualize network flows. It's a nice way to see the magic:

https://vimeo.com/17248120

and yet, they cannot come up with a creative name

Funny you say that. JSX existed as a language that compiles to javascript before Facebook choosed to use that name :

https://github.com/jsx/JSX

and don't get me started on flux,relay or graphQL ...

And even before that Firefox supported a different JSX which also let you embed xml in JS. Looks like they removed it some time ago...

I think you are talking about e4x. It is really too bad it didn't end up in the spec.

choosed -> chose

Yeah, I always had hard time with this verb, excuse my french.

It's pretty amazing that the traffic was nearly entirely redirected in 20 seconds and then whatever issue that was plaguing the server was resolved so quickly.

The latter part is because it was a simulated failure using their Chaos Kong (follow their link to Chaos Experiment: http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/09/chaos-engineering-upgrad... ).

A really interesting article from a couple years ago that talks about their tech behind the regional failover can be found here: http://techblog.netflix.com/2013/12/active-active-for-multi-...

Seems stupid to call it flux

Surely it's because it looks like a flux capacitor. Seems reasonable to me.

Correct. Compare the image at the top of the article (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1UN25h8GKVw/VgxffFjqvUI/AAAAAAAAAQ...) to http://electroshadow.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/FluxCapa...

Isn't that mostly an accident of the current data center infrastructure and subject to change? If they had waited until, say, EU-East-1 or Asia-East-1 came along they might as well have called it Switzerland.

The GP might be referring to the fact that Facebook also has a project called Flux [1].

[1] https://facebook.github.io/flux/

Agreed, considering how new and trendy Flux is ... that is a weird name usage.

They should have called it Uterus.

I came here just to confirm that someone would complain about the name.

Especially since Netflix is using React pretty heavily- they must know that there's a conflict.

React is tangible and an actual product; FB's flux is a cute name for a very fuzzy concept.

Well, Flux is a library as well, and it's pretty well understood. Not sure what's fuzzy about it.

cool! but they couldn't have thought of a different name?

They named it flux because it looks like the Flux Capacitor.

http://backtothefuture.wikia.com/wiki/Flux_capacitor

Perfect name if you ask me :)

I thought this article was a new use-case of FB's Flux initially.

Great name, but perhaps the headline could have read "Netflix Flux: ..." or "Traffic Flux: ..."

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