Netflix open sources Janitor Monkey to help tidy up unused Amazon cloud resources

Janitor Money finds, cleans up cloud assets

Online video streaming company -- and heavy Amazon cloud user -- Netflix has open sourced Janitor Monkey, a tool that finds unused cloud resources and deletes them, leading to potentially valuable cost savings for customers.

There is a growing ecosystem of cloud cost management tools on the market that track customers' usage of cloud resources, and specifically resources in Amazon's cloud. But this is a free and open source tool available for download from GitHub.

It's from Netflix's Simian Army, which is a family of programs made by Netflix engineers to optimize their usage of Amazon's cloud. Last year, Netflix open sourced Chaos Monkey, which is a free way for Amazon customers to test fault tolerance by randomly shutting down instances to see if the system is architected for continuity in the event of downtime.

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Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.

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