Don't Worry, Do Care With Aaron Blohowiak

Aaron Blohowiak joins host Jessica Kerr to discuss his DevOps work at Netflix.

Cost Compression

Aaron discusses the three big projects he’s working on. The first is cost efficiency, or, as Netflix thinks of it, “cost compression.”

Jessica: “Oh, so you have to achieve cost compression without telling engineers not to spend money.”

Aaron: “If you don’t believe you can predict very well, then what you should do instead is get really good at reacting.”

The panel discusses the difference between autonomy and agency.

The panel talks about the utility of data dashboards.

Aaron: “The dashboards are more like cost debugging ultilities.”

Aaron talks about his second big project, “a unified strategy for access isolation.”

Jessica: “You want the cells to have access to the other cells in the same muscle tissue, but if they need a nerve ending they have to say so!”

Aaron explains the third big project he’s working on, “Netflix’s regional growth and high availability story.”

Aaron talks about how Netflix produces original content all over the world, and the coordination required to serve all the computation needs of the various projects in different places.

Ecology, the Ascendent Perspective

Thinking in Systems

Aaron’s blog post, The Sufficiently Smart Engineer