That’s handy to have in a world of quickly shifting virtual machines. Importantly, Edda augments the information that engineers get from AWS itself, which Netflix Engineer Cory Bennett characterized as fast and efficient but limited. With the AWS APIs alone, for example, “there is no way to find an instance by the hostname, or find all instances in a specific Availability Zone without first fetching all the instances and iterating through them,” Bennett wrote.

Edda gives its users a window into the kinds of historical information about their resources that Amazon’s own APIs don’t provide, by handling each resource as versioned documents “that can be recalled via the REST APIs.”

“For instance, if we see a host with an EC2 hostname that is causing problems on one of our API servers then we need to find out what that host is and what team is responsible, Edda allows us to do this.”

The Edda code, now available on Github, addresses that shortcoming. It enables Netflix personnel to query and analyze its AWS resources fast using lots of different search criteria. By making it available on Github, other companies use it and tweak it as needed, provided they make their changes broadly available.

This is just the latest of Netflix’s open-sourced goodies related to AWS. In late June, it released its Asgard technology that makes it easier for AWS customers to deploy code changes and manage their resources. In July, it was Netflix’s oft-cited Chaos Monkey for testing the reliability of cloud services. In September, it did the same with Eureka, its mid-tier load balancing technology.

Netflix is both one of Amazon’s biggest customers and a competitor since Amazon also offers streamed and downloadable video. It’s also becoming a go-to source for technologies that make core Amazon cloud services more reliable and scalable.

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On Tuesday, Netflix posted code for its Eureka service, which provides mid-tier load balancing that Amazon itself does not offer, to the Github repository so that other AWS customers can tweak it for their own needs.

According to a post to the Netflix tech blog, Eureka is a REST-based service that makes it easier to balance loads and ease failover in mid-tier servers.  Eureka, once known as Netflix discovery services, consists of a services registry and a Java client that makes interacting with those services easier.  The client provides base-level round-robin load balancing, but the broader service offers a more sophisticated load balancer that weighs resource usage, error conditions, and other factors for improved resiliency.

According to the blog:

In AWS cloud, because of its inherent nature, servers come and go. Unlike the traditional load balancers which work with servers with well known IP addresses and host names, in AWS load balancing requires much more sophistication in registering and de-registering servers with the load balancer on the fly. Since AWS does not yet provide a middle tier load balancer, Eureka fills a big gap in that area.

This is not the first time Netflix has stepped in to fill a void in Amazon’s platform and open-sourced the result.  In June, the company put the source code to the Asgard technology it uses to deploy code changes fast (and to retract those changes just as fast if needed) to Github. Netflix  said it is also working to integrate Asgard with Eureka.

The whole Netflix-Amazon relationship is getting complicated. Amazon Web Services proudly points to Netflix as one of its biggest and best customers but Amazon the retailer is encroaching on Netflix’ turf with its own streaming video business. And Netflix was badly dinged by an AWS outage earlier this year. Eureka could mitigate such disruptions in the future, but you have to wonder what Netflix will do if and when a massively scalable cloud platform from another provider becomes available.

In other words, stay tuned.

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The next-gen project is experimental at this point, covering 16,000 square feet, and producing 2 MW with 35 heliostats and a 164-foot tower. One of Abengoa’s other solar power towers produces 11 MW with 624 heliostats and a 377-foot tower. But Abengoa says that it is “the first high-temperature solar tower in Europe.” And the photos are really cool, check em out:

Photos, images courtesy of Abengoa.

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