Netflix (s nflx), it seems, is to cloud computing what Google (s goog) and Facebook (s fb) are to distributed systems, generally. Today, Netflix has open sourced its latest technology for keeping its cloud-hosted applications running — a set of libraries, called Hystrix, that is designed to manage interactions between the myriad services that comprise the company’s distributed architecture. If you’re building service-oriented architectures in the Amazon Web Services (s amzn) cloud, it might be worth a look.

Netflix Engineer Ben Christensen explained Hystrix thusly in a blog post on Monday:

Hystrix is a library designed to control the interactions between these distributed services providing greater tolerance of latency and failure. Hystrix does this by isolating points of access between the services, stopping cascading failures across them, and providing fallback options, all of which improve the system’s overall resiliency.

Hystrix actually stems from earlier work to add resilience to…