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There are a couple of things that make Netflix somewhat unique. 1) They have a fairly limited catalog (contrast with the constant ingestion of new content by Y

by derf_ 8y ago

There are a couple of things that make Netflix somewhat unique. 1) They have a fairly limited catalog (contrast with the constant ingestion of new content by Youtube, for example) 2) The cheapest way for them to ensure they have sufficient capacity to handle peak loads leaves them with a lot of extra compute during non-peak times. That excess compute is essentially free.

gowld 8y ago
Re #1: It's not catalog size that matters; it's more like revenue per minute of video, or views per minute of video Re #2: This is a fairly standard batch-vs-online compute mix tradeoff faced by large enterprises.
ktta 8y ago
>That excess compute is essentially free. Since they host on AWS, wouldn't they just scale down during non-peak times and save money?
- majewsky 8y ago
  The AWS-hosted part is not the CDN afaik, which will probably make up the vast majority of their infrastructure.
  - ktta 8y ago
    If you're talking about OpenConnect, then I think they are really geared to just be a CDN and not much else.
  - walrus01 8y ago
    Speaking as an ISP: Netflix traffic comes from the Netflix ASN and peering session. Their globally distributed CDN/caching/video file storage servers are not on AWS to the best of my knowledge. Netflix traffic does not come from our peering with Amazon's ASN.
- svachalek 8y ago
  They do, but as any large AWS customer you want to reserve a lot of capacity, so that it's there when you need it and also it's a lot cheaper than spot usage. So, scaling down below the reserved capacity doesn't save you much if anything.
- Tarq0n 8y ago
  Netflix has an internal spot market for compute, letting them use their reserved instances somewhat optimally.
jadedhacker 8y ago
For what it's worth, I don't know what YouTube's actual constraints look like, but it doesn't seem implausible that they might still be open to reencoding their top 10k video. After a billion views, you might get some substantial savings. EDIT: After all, they did implement VP8/9 ;)

by derf_ 8y ago

gowld 8y ago

Re #1: It's not catalog size that matters; it's more like revenue per minute of video, or views per minute of video Re #2: This is a fairly standard batch-vs-online compute mix tradeoff faced by large enterprises.

ktta 8y ago

>That excess compute is essentially free. Since they host on AWS, wouldn't they just scale down during non-peak times and save money?

majewsky 8y ago
The AWS-hosted part is not the CDN afaik, which will probably make up the vast majority of their infrastructure.
- ktta 8y ago
  If you're talking about OpenConnect, then I think they are really geared to just be a CDN and not much else.
- walrus01 8y ago
  Speaking as an ISP: Netflix traffic comes from the Netflix ASN and peering session. Their globally distributed CDN/caching/video file storage servers are not on AWS to the best of my knowledge. Netflix traffic does not come from our peering with Amazon's ASN.
svachalek 8y ago
They do, but as any large AWS customer you want to reserve a lot of capacity, so that it's there when you need it and also it's a lot cheaper than spot usage. So, scaling down below the reserved capacity doesn't save you much if anything.
Tarq0n 8y ago
Netflix has an internal spot market for compute, letting them use their reserved instances somewhat optimally.

jadedhacker 8y ago

For what it's worth, I don't know what YouTube's actual constraints look like, but it doesn't seem implausible that they might still be open to reencoding their top 10k video. After a billion views, you might get some substantial savings. EDIT: After all, they did implement VP8/9 ;)