January 2, 2026
Uptime goes bananas
The Netflix Simian Army (2011)
Netflix used chaos monkeys to keep shows playing — commenters say most companies still slip on bananas
TLDR: Netflix built Chaos Monkey to intentionally break things so streaming keeps working, inspiring a whole “Simian Army.” Commenters cheer the bold idea but say most companies still don’t do it, argue DIY chaos versus vendor tools, and crack Planet-of-the-Apes jokes while sharing scrappy homebrew chaos tricks.
Netflix’s 2011 gambit was wild: unleash Chaos Monkey to randomly knock over servers so the stream never stops. The result? A whole Simian Army of reliability gremlins, from Latency Monkey to Janitor Monkey. The community is loving the throwback, but also bringing serious tea to the table via the original post.
The hottest take? “The future is already here, just unevenly distributed.” Users like sovietmudkipz say most companies talked a big game and only started chaos testing years later — if at all. mbb70 mourns that “agent” beat “monkey,” because let’s be honest, a Planet of the Apes vibe would’ve been iconic. Skeptics pile on: many orgs want fancy DR (disaster recovery) plans, but outages are usually self-inflicted, so maybe fix your own mess first.
There’s practical drama too: belter says Netflix did this out of necessity before cloud vendors offered built-in tools — now AWS sells the tame, corporate version of those monkeys. Meanwhile, addled wants to chaos-test Postgres (the popular database) and is hunting for ways to inject errors, proving the chaos itch is spread far and wide. And voidUpdate drops comedy gold with a DIY “garbage monkey” that spams UI buttons to catch animation bugs. The verdict: people love the idea, but most still run from the banana peels.
Key Points
- •Netflix advocates continuous, controlled failure testing to validate cloud resilience beyond design-time redundancy.
- •Chaos Monkey randomly terminates production instances during business hours to improve automatic recovery and ensure no customer impact.
- •Latency Monkey injects delays in RESTful communication to simulate service degradation or downtime without shutting services down.
- •Conformity, Doctor, and Janitor Monkeys enforce best practices, remove unhealthy instances, and clean unused resources.
- •Security Monkey extends conformity checks to detect security violations or vulnerabilities.