New From Netflix: Open-Sourced Gatekeeper To Improve The Delivery Of Web Services

Barb Darrow | GigaOM | June 12, 2013

Netflix is open sourcing yet another tool to augment the Amazon Web Services infrastructure it relies on to deliver streaming media to myriad devices.

The latest is called Zuul, a nod to the gatekeeper in Ghostbusters and, like its namesake, Netflix Zuul acts as a gatekeeper between the Netflix API (and other Netflix services) and AWS Elastic Load Balancer that routes video to users. (see chart.)

Netflix API lead Daniel Jacobson explains it better than I could: “Zuul is basically a front application for the Netflix streaming application… it does much of the system-level work such as dynamic routing, load shedding, insights, health analysis etc so the other backend applications in the system can maintain focus on their part of the streaming application,” he said via email.