If true, that would be pretty interesting - priority is a common feature to implement on top of a naive scheduler, but 'nice' values are harder to connect to dollar amounts.

Unfortunately, the article doesn't go into any detail if that is, indeed, what they implemented.

It's unlikely that Netflix implemented anything this complex for video encoding, since Cook is only valuable when you're scheduling jobs from parties with conflicting incentives, rather than a singular purpose like "encode all Netflix video".

It's expensive to operate thousands of instances in AWS, so I presume there's also a relentless push internally to drive down costs.

Thanks for the link to Cook, that's fascinating. The fact that it plugs into Mesos seems quite useful!

>Cook is a powerful batch scheduler, specifically designed to provide a great user experience when there are more jobs to run than your cluster has capacity for.

Using other servers as lower priority job servers is a great way to increase utilization during off-peak times and save on server costs. You have to think about what happens if either a batch job or the server's main task runs away with all the system resources, so it can get tricky. A spot market might actually be an interesting solution to some of those problems, though for most of us, just using disk quotas and nice levels will be enough.