TheyвЂ™re sets of libraries/frameworks/configurations that need to be included in your Java application/service code. Netflix OSS is for Java developers mostly. Additionally, because containers are basically opaque packaging of services, we tend not to care as much about what technology is really running inside them (is it Java? is it Node.js? is it Go?). With the emergence of linux containers, Docker, container management systems, etc weвЂ™re starting to see a lot of value running our microservices in linux containers (in a cloud, in a private cloud, both, etc). A lot of assumptions about this heritage are baked into the Netflix libraries that may no longer apply based on where youвЂ™re running (ie linux containers, etc) today.

And thatвЂ™s just too bad.ДЄnyway, a lot of Netflix OSS was written at a time where things ran on an AWS cloud and there were no alternatives. Some other large internet companies patent their findings and keep them closed source. Other internet companies do this as well, so thank you. A quick вЂњthank-youвЂќ as well that Netflix decided to contribute to the broader open-source community with these libraries and frameworks. Patterns for service discovery, load balancing, fault-tolerance, etc are incredibly important concepts for scalable distributed systems and Netflix brings nice solutions for these.

Today, for Java developers, itвЂ™s pretty synonymous with developing microservices in a cloud environment. Netflix OSS is a set of frameworks and libraries that Netflix wrote to solve some interesting distributed-systems problems at scale. I get questions from folks about NetflixOSS (itвЂ™s awesome) and how it might run in Kubernetes (itвЂ™s awesome too!) and where the overlap is for some of the components.

Some of this I cover in my book вЂњMicroservices for Java DevelopersвЂќ OвЂ™Reilly June 2016 (launching soon!), but I want to give a more specific treatment of it here.

Genie netflix client