From Netflix to the Cloud: Adrian Cockroft on DevOps, Microservices, and Sustainability

Platform Engineering Podcast

In this episode Cory sits down with Adrian Cockroft, a pioneering technologist who played a crucial role in Netflix's transition to cloud computing and microservices architecture. Adrian shares insights from his impressive career, including his work at Netflix, AWS, and beyond. He discusses the evolution of DevOps practices, the rise of microservices, and the challenges of platform engineering in today's complex cloud environments. Adrian also delves into the pressing issue of sustainability in tech, offering valuable perspectives on the environmental impact of AI and machine learning workloads. Whether you're a seasoned DevOps professional or just starting your journey in cloud computing, this episode offers a wealth of knowledge from one of the industry's most influential figures.

Guest: Adrian Cockcroft, Tech Advisor

Adrian Cockcroft is a technologist and strategist with broad experience from the bits to the boardroom, in both enterprise and consumer-oriented businesses, from startups to some of the largest companies in the world, equally at home with hardware and software, development and operations.

He’s best known as the cloud architect for Netflix during their trailblazing migration to AWS and was a very early practitioner and advocate of DevOps, microservices, and chaos engineering, helping bring these concepts to the wider audience they have today. Adrian spent the last few years as a VP at Amazon deeply immersed in the dual challenges of helping Amazon itself – one of the largest companies in the world – become more sustainable, and via AWS – one of the largest technology suppliers in the world – helping its enterprise and public sector customers become more sustainable.

Adrian Cockcroft - Mastodon

Adrian Cockcroft - Medium

Adrian Cockcroft - GitHub

Adrian Cockcroft - Soundcloud

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• Cloud for CEOs: Measure innovation with one metric
• Sun Performance and Tuning: Java and the Internet
• ACM Queue, “A Conversation with Werner Vogels”
• The Value Flywheel Effect: Power the Future and Accelerate Your Organization to the Modern Cloud
• That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea
• Medium, “So many bad takes — What is there to learn from the Prime Video microservices to monolith story”
• Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
• “How do Committees Invent?” by Melvin Conway
• Lambda Labs
• Medium, “Platform Engineering Teams Done Right…”
• AWS Well-Architected Framework - Sustainability
• Green Software Foundation
• Green Software Foundation, Real-Time Cloud
• Environmental Variables podcast