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Hehe, I can feel your pain. Had a discussion just a few days ago with some guys demonstrating the typical enthusiasm about cloud stuff, especially AWS. Because

Hehe, I can feel your pain. Had a discussion just a few days ago with some guys demonstrating the typical enthusiasm about cloud stuff, especially AWS. Because after all, Netflix is using it, and they create 1/3rd of all Internet traffic, right? There's this very widespread misconception about Netflix being a monolithic service running on Amazons' cloud infrastructure, even though the truth is that just the "rather boring" routine stuff like billing, view history tracking, suggestions, everything necessary to show the UI is running there. Netflix does a good job at this, but after all it's not that impressive when you've architected some distributed systems yourself. Not even their extreme take on the microservices concept - that is after all just a nice way of letting their devs do "their thing" in the way they want with as little restrictions from the environment as possible (which basically only works because they clearly have above-average-competence devs who can deal with these degrees of freedom). What's really crazy is the way they squeeze unimaginable amounts of bytes per second out of modern hardware and into the internet infrastructure. They saturate 100Gbit links that usually serve an aggregation of many boxes in a datacenter with just ONE box! This is way beyond what even most above-average devs are capable of doing - you NEED old-school guys which still managed to stay on top of the crazy stack created by the evolution of hardware and low-level software in the last decade. There's not many of those out there, and Netflix apparently managed to catch a good bunch of them. These guys do the magic, and the magic they do never touches that damn Amazon Cloud. It just floats way above it.

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
Netflix is my goto example of "do your core competency in-house, outsource the rest". They do one thing themselves in their stack: their distribution network for content, and they do an incredible job of it. Every post I see about Netflix's CDN for video is insightful and a learning experience. Then they throw a CRUD app in the cloud on top of it and call it a day. Okay, a little simplified -- there's still some neat tech in the DRM, in load-balancing the CDN, and in keeping all of their tech highly available. But conceivably, Netflix could retain much of their value by simply offering all the content to other websites that displayed it to customers -- the hard part of what they do is the CDN (and contracts with content owners), and opening their platform to other interfaces doesn't change that. (Heck, Netflix might be worth more if they opened their content to other interfaces, since they're not actually very good at the front end experience.) But when I was doing consulting (about cloud stuff), that was my advice: do the core of your business yourself (eg, CDN) then offload as much of the rest as you can.
X86BSD 9y ago
That's what I find most impressive. The insane amount of bits they do from a single FreeBSD box. And I concur as well on the BSD crew responsible for engineering it. The grey beards are getting harder to find as they retire and I weep each time one does.
luckydude 9y ago
You stated it very well, especially that last paragraph. I'm busily bringing lmbench up to date and seeing if I can get my mojo back enough to hang with these guys and do some work. It's both exciting to think about kernel work and depressing to realize so few people understand it any more.

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago

Netflix is my goto example of "do your core competency in-house, outsource the rest". They do one thing themselves in their stack: their distribution network for content, and they do an incredible job of it. Every post I see about Netflix's CDN for video is insightful and a learning experience. Then they throw a CRUD app in the cloud on top of it and call it a day. Okay, a little simplified -- there's still some neat tech in the DRM, in load-balancing the CDN, and in keeping all of their tech highly available. But conceivably, Netflix could retain much of their value by simply offering all the content to other websites that displayed it to customers -- the hard part of what they do is the CDN (and contracts with content owners), and opening their platform to other interfaces doesn't change that. (Heck, Netflix might be worth more if they opened their content to other interfaces, since they're not actually very good at the front end experience.) But when I was doing consulting (about cloud stuff), that was my advice: do the core of your business yourself (eg, CDN) then offload as much of the rest as you can.

X86BSD 9y ago

That's what I find most impressive. The insane amount of bits they do from a single FreeBSD box. And I concur as well on the BSD crew responsible for engineering it. The grey beards are getting harder to find as they retire and I weep each time one does.

luckydude 9y ago

You stated it very well, especially that last paragraph. I'm busily bringing lmbench up to date and seeing if I can get my mojo back enough to hang with these guys and do some work. It's both exciting to think about kernel work and depressing to realize so few people understand it any more.