The Netflix control plane handles a third of peak Internet traffic. That's an awful lot of customers we need to keep safe from any service outages. Netflix developed "Flow" to wage war against these outages. Flow coordinates recovery from localized disruptions and enables periodic verification through production experimentation called “Chaos Kong.”

Flow endows all services within Netflix the capabilities to withstand regional failure, without individual team intervention. This talk describes the internals and machinations of Flow, how a similar approach may add value to your microservice architecture, and what preconditions must be met - both technically and culturally - for such a recovery mechanism to succeed. We'll give a real-life war story of a 2015 Q4 outage to demonstrate how this approach can turn the threat of a nasty disruption into a harmless, routine event.