I know this piece is mostly about what it's like to work at Netflix, but the more technical part leads to an obvious question: If FreeBSD is so great for performance analysis, and Netflix is already using it at scale, then why not also use it on the EC2 instances? Seems like they could gradually move toward FreeBSD-based instances. Or is Linux really that much better as an EC2 guest?
Until very recently, it's been hard to get FreeBSD to work well on EC2. When I started at Netflix 2.5 years ago, I asked them same thing. I think we're finally at a place where we might be able to start looking at making the move.
But to be honest, we're pretty heavily invested in the Linux ecosystem at this point.
As jedberg said, we're heavily invested in Linux on the cloud, which means there's a large cost associated with the move (porting infrastructure software, tools, and testing).
But FreeBSD has been improving on EC2, such as PVHVM support. If the benefit was big enough, it might outweigh the cost. I'd like to do a little FreeBSD EC2 perf testing this year (as I would for any tech that might pay off)...
