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 f

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.