12 ms·
Netflix to Shut Down Last Datacenter
- orbitur 11y agoThis is 3rd article this week I've been blocked from reading. How are people continually reading and upvoting these links? Is everyone a subscriber? Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/FGY1lSv.png http://i.imgur.com/FGY1lSv.png
- joshmn 11y agoHere you go :) https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCAQqQIwAGoVChMIrNjqwd2nxwIVxRkeCh0O2AXd&url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.wsj.com%2Fcio%2F2015%2F08%2F13%2Fnetflix-to-pull-plug-on-final-data-center%2F&ei=xW3NVezhHcWzeI6wl-gN&usg=AFQjCNHN_Y_WEFgMj2XTrjFoy9NYkDHJ8g&bvm=bv.99804247,d.dmo https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
- nchelluri 11y agoMay I ask how you did that?
- iribe 11y agoit shows the article if the refer(r)er is google
- fjarlq 11y agoThis "Come From Google" (CFG) paywall bypass bookmarklet usually does the trick for me: https://umur.io/paywall-bypass-bookmarklet-come-from-google/ https://umur.io/paywall-bypass-bookmarklet-come-from-google/
- lukebennett 11y agoThanks for the heads up on CFG - sounds useful, though it doesn't seem to work for me.
- joshmn 11y agoDev tools, copied the link. :)
- swang 11y agoI'm confused how this is still allowed by Google. I thought you were not allowed to show Google one thing while other users another?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- coryrc 11y agoYou're not allowed to show google's bots a different thing than what a user sees when they click a search link. Which is not the same as visiting the link via other methods (entering into URL bar directly, for example).
- m_mueller 11y agoFor me it didn't even load the ad, I just saw the "log in" at the bottom and a blank page. "who needs an article when you can have a headline?"
- hasenj 11y agoSame for me. It must be the ad-blocker (uBlock)
- m_mueller 11y agoI'm on FF without adblock extension, so at least for me it wasn't. I'm in Japan however, so I'm probably completely irrelevant to the operators of that webzone. "What are you telling me, Johnny? There's people outside the US who have access to the intertubes? Getoutofhere!"
- tedunangst 11y agoI'm supposed to read the article before up voting?
- agentsmith 11y agohahahahahahahahah!!!!!!!
- reddotX 11y agoprobably bots upvoating
- jfoster 11y agoHow would you know whether the article is worth recommending if you don't read it?
- incepted 11y agoI'm a bit mystified. The link goes to an empty article but if you google the exact title, you will be taken to the full article which... has the exact same URL. I don't know what kind of wizardry this is.
- torinmr 11y agoThey're looking at the HTTP referer [sic]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer Most newspapers don't show paywalls to users coming from a search engine, as part of a compromise with Google to prevent them from being penalized in rankings.
- valleyer 11y agoNot wizardry. Checking referer. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer>
- hasenj 11y agoIndistinguishible form magic
- whatusername 11y agoIsn't it just referer headers?
- h1fra 11y agoIt's even more messed up with an adblocker. You don't even know what is going on http://imgur.com/K9VvuWs http://imgur.com/K9VvuWs
- function_seven 11y ago> But many companies still run sensitive software in their data centers or in private clouds, in which a company has dedicated cloud resources from a third-party or within its own premises. (Emphasis mine) Ok, honest question: If I have a "private cloud" on my own premises, how is that not a data center?
- JoshTriplett 11y ago> If I have a "private cloud" on my own premises, how is that not a data center? It is, but "private cloud" on top of that implies a lot more about how you run that datacenter: using virtual machines, abstracting hardware, using APIs to manage servers and storage (ideally the same APIs that would let you just as easily run on someone else's cloud infrastructure), and otherwise trying to minimize your reliance on any particular piece of hardware.
- function_seven 11y agoThanks. I was looking at it from the power, cooling, and square-footage perspective—didn't even consider the sysadmin portion—but I see the massive savings that could be had by uncoupling metal pizza boxes and one-off hardware requirements from the applications that run on them
- enobrev 11y agoThis may just be a semantic issue, but the term "public" seems entirely misused in this article.
- wmf 11y agoFor better or worse, "public cloud, in which users share the resources of a service provider" is now an accepted term of art in the industry. It doesn't really matter whether it agrees with people's commonsense understanding of the word "public".
- anotherangrydev 11y agoDo you think they have a special deal w/ Amazon? Otherwise I imagine that's a really expensive bill. Do you think they're doing it because its cheaper when you account for things at a larger scale? Like, reduced liabilities, payrolls, CapEx, whatever? Or is it more expensive but still "easier" and they go with it? I really REALLY would like to hear everything from everyone about this, because right now I'm facing that decision for my company. I'm not as big as Netflix obv, but it is a big deal for me. It is really attractive to have all the scale you need at will and forget about maintenance at all; even if it is more expensive I would gladly pay as much as double my operating costs if I can rest easily at night. I would even eat as much as 10%-20% of my profits if I don't have to deal with that. But the devil is in the details, I think is relatively easier to go full-cloud than to later find out it was a mistake and try to migrate back to your private premises. So, what could be the downsides of going full-cloud just as Netflix did? Also, taking into account that I'm not a personal friend of Bezos neither another Netflix, I would be just another smallish guy and I'm pretty sure that won't get me all the perks that come with the former.
- wmf 11y agoIf you watch any of Cockcroft's presentations you can see that there's nothing easy about it. They developed a significant amount of tooling just to work around quirks in EC2, but apparently the elasticity is worth it.
- marcog1 11y agoThey likely get a good deal, but either way their content licensing costs are huge in comparison and make their Amazon bill a drop in the ocean.
- robbrown451 11y agoAssuming Amazon can do it slightly cheaper than Netflix could (i.e. Netflix doesn't have to duplicate Amazon's fixed costs, such as engineering), and that Netflix has enough bargaining power to pay Amazon very little over what it costs them to provide it....seems like an economic decision to me.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- probdist 11y agoNetflix is still running its own CDNs / using CDNs outside of Amazon. "The company, which competes with Amazon in the video-streaming business, elected to keep control of its own content delivery network." So Netflix is still probably doing the bulk of their traffic themselves. Application servers with AWS is probably not a huge bill versus massive video traffic.
- whoopdedo 11y agoI was wondering about that. Open Connect was significant in the disagreement between Netflix and Comcast that spurred the net neutrality debate. Unless I'm mistaken Netflix ended up agreeing to the peering fees, though after negotiating down a bit. So does using AWS for mundane traffic actually save them money by avoiding the CDN bandwidth that Netflix has to pay ISPs to use?
- wmf 11y agoAFAIK Amazon charges more for bandwidth than the greediest ISP, but I admit I haven't looked at the EB/month transfer tier.
- skuhn 11y agoThere's literally no way to operate a CDN-like service from AWS; no matter what discount you get from Amazon, you're paying per-byte instead of 95th percentile billing and settlement-free peering.
- oldgregg 11y agoFascinating. I bet they are running their own CDN to prevent Amazon from having full access to their traffic volume/streaming demand. Would be huge competitive advantage for amazon streaming if they could see per-title demand.
- wmf 11y agoOr because it's cheaper.
- fiberoptick 11y agoI've never understood why so many companies are comfortable giving Amazon such leverage over their business infrastructure. Could someone explain why this is a good move in spite of the risk that Amazon could jack their prices up in the future?
- nickff 11y agoThe free market is the basic guarantee Netflix is counting on.[1] If Amazon 'jacks up it's prices', Netflix will simply move to another provider. Amazon is also unlikely to make sudden moves which disadvantage its customers, as any such moves will come at a tremendous cost of reputation, and many customers will leave and never come back (; as Amazon has no power to compel customers to purchase their services). In a market, no one has leverage, everyone simply has a position and an offer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market
- knorby 11y ago> If Amazon 'jacks up it's prices', Netflix will simply move to another provider. Like hell they will. The switching cost for Netflix, and really most heavy AWS users, would be extreme at this point. A good portion of the engineering org would pretty much have to dedicate themselves to the task of switching. That isn't to say other organizations can't be nimble between providers, but it would be hard for Netflix at this point. AWS is already engaging in a commodity hardware market in order to run the DCs running. AWS fears becoming a pure extension of the same thing, and they have a decent bit of lock-in designed to their services for that reason.
- tzakrajs 11y agoFeeling dejavu on this announcement. "By the end of next year Reed aims to be 100% on AWS and to be the biggest business entirely hosted on AWS apart from Amazon Retail." Source: http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/12/aws-reinvent-was-awesome.html?m=1 http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/12/aws-reinvent-was-awesome...
- Animats 11y agoThis is very strange. Amazon is in the pay per view streaming video business itself.[1] Netflix is outsourcing their entire business to a direct competitor. At what point will Amazon decide that they don't need Netflix? Or perhaps there's an acquisition or merger coming. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Prime-Instant-Video/b?node=2676882011 http://www.amazon.com/Prime-Instant-Video/b?node=2676882011
- icebraining 11y agoAt what point will Amazon decide that they don't need Netflix? And do what? "We'll jack up the prices if you compete with us" is not good publicity. Besides, it's not that uncommon. For example, the next iPhone will have a CPU from Samsung.
- Aissen 11y agoFrom my understanding this is a simple decision: do not focus on something that isn't your core business. Amazon is doing it well, Microsoft is, the cloud is becoming more competitive every day, and they're big enough not to use the public pricing, so it's even more economical for them. In addition to this, they only need a few "machines" (https://openconnect.netflix.com/hardware/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/hardware/) to have full ISP-local caches of Netflix; why bother with a full datacenter ?
- merb 11y agoPeople on HN just don't understand that the Basic Hosting company won't give a scalable Network for free. And with scalable Network I mean a Physical / Virtual Network where you could connect / disconnect Nodes and connect it with arbitrary Networks. And that's basically something which costs a huge amount of money especially when you want to connect two Locations. When you need HA and don't get such a network you would need to create a Overlay Network over VPN, etc by yourself which could be quite hard to manage (even for a low amount of servers) In germany we could buy Virtual servers as low as 5-10 Euro / month however you can't buy 3 in different locations and they are connected with an private internal network for free (there aren't even many hosters that will do that, i don't think there are any outside of the saas platforms) however you could rent non virtual servers and buy additional stuff on these Hosters which adds a huge costs per month. So running on AWS / Google Cloud / Azure / etc could be really cheap. It just depends on the Things you need. Edit: Also AWS gives you a lot of credits for just doing surveys for their new stuff. I have so many credits so that I run my private gitlab instance on AWS and it costs me nothing. I never got a credit of my previous Hoster which I used over 10 years. On AWS I just got a 200 USD Credit at the start since I missed my Free year (also only cloud providers giving you credits, the most other Hosters won't do that and they bareley give you something new on AWS. You could now run a Website for basically nothing just with AWS Lambda which costs nearly nothing.)