Continuous Deployment

Building Resilience in Production Migrations

What's the focus of the work that you do today?

I lead Billing Infrastructure Engineering at Netflix. We build the infrastructure that helps Netflix collect charges from its members. Part of that is to determine who should be charged and how much through our systems. We also hold all the gift codes and balances and track them. We also support major customer workflows. Our services participate in gift redemptions, Method of payment updates, cancellation requests etc.  We also do financial reporting.

What’s the motivation for this talk?

To get a bit of why resilience is important specifically for us. We believe that for systems like us, we do our best when we are not visible, when nobody notices. It's a topic very close to my heart, how to build resilient systems, how to not go down. Our infrastructure  shouldn't be the reason people cannot watch what they wanted to. The motivation of the talk is primarily to share some of the things that we have seen over the years. Since I joined Netflix we've done major overhaul and nobody has noticed that infrastructure has been shifting. These kind of  projects have a thought process which starts even before we start the project, how to manage the resiliency, not going down. We have some interesting stuff to share that other people can benefit from as well.