This is beautiful:

SAN FRANCISCO — What does not kill me, makes me stronger. So said Nietzsche, Conan the Barbarian, and Kelly Clarkson.

Now Netflix cloud director Ariel Tseitlin is taking that philosophy to its natural limit in the world of the cloud. Every day, he unleashes an army of virtual monkeys on his company’s computing infrastructure, trying to kill it. Every day, it survives — and it gets stronger, more resilient, and more resistant to real outages. By now, it is almost unkillable.

As a result, Netflix has managed to stay online even while other users of Amazon’s cloud system have gone offline.

“Their sole purpose is to make sure that we’re failing in a consistent and frequent enough way to make sure that we don’t drift into overall failure,” Tseitlin said today at CloudBeat 2013, VentureBeat’s conference on the enterprise cloud.

from VentureBeat.