Don't Worry, Do Care With Aaron Blohowiak

Cost Compression

Aaron discusses the three big projects he’s working on. The first is cost efficiency, or, as Netflix thinks of it, “cost compression.”

Jessica: “Oh, so you have to achieve cost compression without telling engineers not to spend money.”

Aaron: “If you don’t believe you can predict very well, then what you should do instead is get really good at reacting.”

The panel discusses the difference between autonomy and agency.

The panel talks about the utility of data dashboards.

Aaron: “The dashboards are more like cost debugging ultilities.”

Access Isolation

Aaron talks about his second big project, “a unified strategy for access isolation.”

Jessica: “You want the cells to have access to the other cells in the same muscle tissue, but if they need a nerve ending they have to say so!”

Regional Growth and Availability

Aaron explains the third big project he’s working on, “Netflix’s regional growth and high availability story.”

Aaron talks about how Netflix produces original content all over the world, and the coordination required to serve all the computation needs of the various projects in different places.

Shared Reading List

Ecology, the Ascendent Perspective

Thinking in Systems

Aaron’s blog post, The Sufficiently Smart Engineer

Episode source