Netflix Open Sources More of its Useful Utilities

Cloud computing platforms make headlines every day now, including leading open source platforms such as OpenStack, but few organizations have the cloud expertise that Netflix has. The company also has an admirable history of open sourcing many of its most useful cloud tools and accompanying security tools. We've reported on Netflix open sourcing a series of interesting "Monkey" cloud tools as part of its "simian army," which it has deployed as a series satellite utilities orbiting its central cloud platform.

Now, Netflix has released three of its internal tools that help protect the security of its platform, and function as convenient utilities.

Scumblr, Workflowable and Sketchy are available now. Detailed instructions on setup and configuration are available in the projects’ wiki pages

According to a post from Netflix's security team:

"Many security teams need to stay on the lookout for Internet-based discussions, posts, and other bits that may be of impact to the organizations they are protecting...Scumblr is a Ruby on Rails web application that allows searching the Internet for sites and content of interest. Scumblr includes a set of built-in libraries that allow creating searches for common sites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. For other sites, it is easy to create plugins to perform targeted searches and return results. Once you have Scumblr setup, you can run the searches manually or automatically on a recurring basis."

"Sketchy at its core provides a scalable task-based framework to capture screenshots, scrape page text, and save HTML through a simple to use API.  These captures can be stored locally or on an AWS S3 bucket.  Optionally, token auth can be configured and callbacks can be used if required." 

Netflix previously released Janitor Monkey and Chaos Monkey, which are cloud tools. You can peruse Netflix's overall open source software resource center on GitHub.  The company is steadily releasing proven tools that can be quite useful for administrators. Netflix has also said that it has more tools to be open sourced soon.