Innovation in Technology

If you are in technology domain, you must know about Chaos Monkey. Chaos monkey is a tool invented in 2011 by Netflix to test resilience of it’s IT infrastructure. The concept is invented by simulating a scenario whereas a monkey physically gets into IT data center and starts crashing servers and unwiring critical IT instruments one after another. Think of the Chaos, a notorious Monkey can cause in your data center within minutes. Especially if your data center is supporting streaming services for Netflix!

Netflix started moving to distributed cloud architecture in 2008 after a major database corruption which resulted in 3 days of business impact. Single monolithic deployment was converted to distributed micro service based deployments on Amazon Web Services(AWS), however this also resulted in complex inter dependencies and risk of multiple points of failure. This is when Netflix engineers came up with idea of Chaos monkey which introduces failures randomly at each IT component level. Tag line was “The best way to avoid failure is to fail continuously”. Designers and developers were motivated to build systems which are highly resilient and systems are tested for all possible failures. In fact the concept has evolved over period of time and concept of chaos monkey has matured into chaos engineering which is integral part of advanced DevOps engineering now. The concept has given birth to latency monkey which introduces communication delays to test simulate network outage, security monkey which finds and disables security vulnerabilities, Byte-Monkey which tests random failure of JVM and many more!

If you take a step back in history, no sane IT guy could have imagined unplugging production servers for testing purpose. However Netflix IT team had vision to support exponential growth of streaming services and innovative ways to design and test their systems. Netflix streaming services have grown more than 1000 times since 2008 and covers more than 130 countries across globe. This would have not been possible without moving to distributed cloud ☁️architecture which helped them to expand fast in different geographies without worrying about data centers and allowing teams to innovate.

Innovation in technology may have multiple dimensions, however effectiveness can be measured only by what value you bring for business and how do you help organizations create value streams. In above example, the paradigm shift in software deployment and testing itself is a great innovation which is being replicated by many of IT teams. Technology can empower IT teams to provide solutions, however the need of hour is to apply technology to solve business problems effectively and provide solutions which are sustainable as per business model. And the most important aspect is to innovate continuously and keep the pace with changing business landscape, understand customer behavior and changing requirements. If you recall, before iPhone there was BlackBerry which arguably was first smart phone of all times. BlackBerry had capability to connect to internet, send/receive emails, chat with other users and many more features. However BlackBerry was unable to keep pace with time and stubbornly sticking to physical keyboard while the world moved over to full touchscreen. Technology innovation could not keep pace with time and changing customer requirements. Result is known to everyone, Blackberry sales went down from 50 million devices in 2011 to less than 4 million devices in 2016!

As a technologist, I believe we are in a very exciting time and advent of new technologies such as Artificial intelligence, Blockchain, IoT, cloud computing, big data analytics and Open APIs have great potential. Success will depend upon collaboration with business, leverage technology at right avenues and create sustainable value streams.