Netflix recently outlined precisely just how it makes its popular video streaming service so efficient. 

Apparently, the answer is monkeys.

The company said it employs a set of cloud software called the Simian Army, to ensure everything runs smoothly.

A Chaos Monkey first randomly kills virtual machines, ensuring that small outages won't disrupt the overall system. Next, they have a Security Monkey which looks for security and configurations flaws. Lastly, a Janitor Monkey helps out by looking for unused system resources and shutting them down.

All in all, the Simian Army maintains a level of efficiency capable of dealing with even Netflix's busiest hours.

Netflix didn't release this information just to brag, however, as the video streaming company also unveiled plans to release the source code to these programs as well as the rest of its streaming platform, providing other cloud developers the opportunity to learn from this system.

Adrian Cockroft, the Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix, said that the basic plan is “to release pretty much all of our platform, including the Monkey infrastructure, over the rest of this year,” adding that, “We will be doing bits and pieces of it through the summer and into the fall.”

Netflix has, over the last year, become a major publisher of open-source code, having released the code for a number of its in-house projects. The practice isn't completely altruistic, however, as it allows Netflix to measure up and keep track of what other cloud developers are doing.

Netflix, a company touted as having some of the highest return on equity in the Internet retail industry, lost 800,000 of its customers last year after increasing the price of its DVD delivery service; the price of its streaming service remained the same. The company, just this week, released its streaming app on Microsoft's (News - Alert) Windows Phone platform in Latin America, the U.K. and Ireland.