Applying Netflix DevOps Patterns to Windows

In the Netflix full cycle DevOps culture the team responsible for building a service is also responsible for deploying, testing, infrastructure, and operation of that service. A key responsibility of Netflix engineers is identifying gaps and pain points in the development and operation of services. Though the majority of our services run on Linux Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), there are still many services critical to the Netflix Playback Experience running on Windows Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances at scale.

We looked at our process for creating a Windows AMI and discovered it was error-prone and full of toil. First, an engineer would launch an EC2 instance and wait for the instance to come online. Once the instance was available, the engineer would use a remote administration tool like RDP to login to the instance to install software and customize settings.

This image was then saved as an AMI and used in an Auto Scale Group to deploy a cluster of instances. Because this process was time consuming and painful, our Windows instances were usually missing the latest security updates from Microsoft.

Source: medium.com