Netflix's New Peering Appliance Uses FreeBSD

[Benjamin Francom]

I just saw this, and thought I'd share:

Open Connect Appliance Software

Netflix delivers streaming content using a combination of intelligent
clients, a central control system, and a network of Open Connect appliances.

When designing the Open Connect Appliance Software, we focused on these
fundamental design goals:

   - Use of Open Source software
   - Ability to efficiently read from disk and write to network sockets
   - High-performance HTTP delivery
   - Ability to gather routing information via BGP

Operating System

For the operating system, we use FreeBSD <http://www.freebsd.org/> version
9.0. This was selected for its balance of stability and features, a strong
development community and staff expertise. We will contribute changes we
make as part of our project to the community through the FreeBSD committers
on our team.
Web server

We use the nginx <http://www.nginx.org/> web server for its proven
scalability and performance. Netflix audio and video is served via HTTP.
Routing intelligence proxy

We use the BIRD Internet routing daemon <http://bird.network.cz/> to enable
the transfer of network topology from ISP networks to the Netflix control
system that directs clients to sources of content.
Acknowledgements

We would would like to express our thanks to the FreeBSD community, the
nginx community, and Ondrej and the BIRD team for providing excellent open
source software. We also work directly with Igor, Maxim, Andrew, Sergey,
Ruslan and the rest of the team at nginx.com <http://www.nginx.com/>, who
provide superb development support for our project."

-- 
Benjamin Francom
Information Technology Professional
http://www.benfrancom.com