Cloud computing is revolutionizing how data is being handled as it eliminates the need for building large data centers in multiple locations.  Today, web-based services are relying more and more on the cloud to keep data available to users anytime, anywhere.  The problem is, though revolutionary, it is still not flawless as we’ve seen in the previous service outages happening lately.

What companies are looking for these days is something that would perfect the cloud or at least something closer to perfection.

Netflix, the streaming media company, has been using Hystrix, a library designed to control the interactions between these distributed services providing greater tolerance of latency and failure,” in their own system.  Hystrix works by “isolating points of access between the services, stopping cascading failures across them, and providing fallback options, all of which improve the system’s overall resiliency.”

And out of the goodness of their hearts, Netflix has open sourced Hystrix, even if this means their competitors could also benefit from it.  It is now available to be download for free on GitHub but if you want to learn more about it before you download Hystrix, you can check out its full documentation which includes How to get started, How it works, How to use, as well as Operations.

Netflix states that developers could get and build the following code:
$ git clone git@github.com:Netflix/Hystrix.git
$ cd Hystrix/
$ ./gradlew build

Not only that, in the near future, they will be releasing the real-time monitoring dashboard for Hystrix, much like the one they use one Netflix.  The beauty of the dashboard is that in informs you in real-time if something is about to go wrong so you can quickly fix it before disaster strikes.

This isn’t the first time Netflix has open sourced one of their cloud babies.  Just this August, they open sourced Chaos Monkey, “a service that runs on AWS and improves application resiliency by helping ensure an application can remain running if an instance unexpectedly shuts down – a universally helpful capability for any cloud-based application.”