A large and unexpected opportunity has come my way outside of Netflix that I’ve decided to try. Netflix has been the best job of my career so far, and I’ll miss my colleagues and the culture.

I joined Netflix in 2014, a company at the forefront of cloud computing with an attractive work culture. It was the most challenging job among those I interviewed for. On the Netflix Java/Linux/EC2 stack there were no working mixed-mode flame graphs, no production safe dynamic tracer, and no PMCs: All tools I used extensively for advanced performance analysis. How would I do my job? I realized that this was a challenge I was best suited to fix. I could help not only Netflix but all customers of the cloud.

Since then I’ve done just that. I developed the original JVM changes to allow mixed-mode flame graphs, I pioneered using eBPF for observability and helped develop the front-ends and tools, and I worked with Amazon to get PMCs enabled and developed tools to use them. Low-level performance analysis is now possible in the cloud, and with it I’ve helped Netflix save a very large amount of money, mostly from service teams using flame graphs. There is also now a flourishing industry of observability products based on my work.

Apart from developing tools, much of my time has been spent helping teams with performance issues and evaluations. The Netflix stack is more diverse than I was expecting, and is