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I'm a bit naive when it comes to infrastructure, since I've never managed it myself. I've always been in companies with dedicated infrastructure :). Why does N

by fma 8y ago

I'm a bit naive when it comes to infrastructure, since I've never managed it myself. I've always been in companies with dedicated infrastructure :). Why does Netflix outsource to AWS? The gripes I've had with dedicated infrastructure team is their knowledge/experience can be hit or miss. My current company is about saving money, so sometimes there's junior guys on there. Or there's guys who need to handle 20 different products, they're good at 10..but suck at the other 10. I personally don't believe they have best practices (but I'm not an infrastructure expert), because downtime happens.

bboreham 8y ago
Netflix couldn’t predict its load in the early days, so saved a ton of money using pay-as-you-ngo rather than building out datacenters. Nowadays they are such a good advert for AWS they probably negotiated a deal which is way cheaper than the published price. Also Netflix’ major cost is content; servers are kind of a rounding error.
sokoloff 8y ago
AFAIK, Netflix does not stream out of AWS, but instead "just" runs their application services on AWS (which is still a significant workload). I seem to recall they offered a rack full of their own caching equipment to medium and larger ISPs (to save both sides streaming costs while providing better service to Netflix customers). Basically a private app-specific CDN.
- fredsted 8y ago
  It's true. If you open Web Inspector while streaming a Netflix movie, the URL it's getting the stream from probably contains your ISP name and region!
philg_jr 8y ago
Netflix maintains their own CDN for video content. They place a rack (multiple racks?) in many different datacenters close to the ISP last mile (possibly within some ISP's own datacenters?). https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
LaserToy 8y ago
Who knows,but I bet some sweet deal was involved. When Netflix started using AWS it wasn’t a thing, it was pretty bad datacenter. Even amazon.com wasn’t using aws (contrary to their marketing material).

by fma 8y ago

bboreham 8y ago

Netflix couldn’t predict its load in the early days, so saved a ton of money using pay-as-you-ngo rather than building out datacenters. Nowadays they are such a good advert for AWS they probably negotiated a deal which is way cheaper than the published price. Also Netflix’ major cost is content; servers are kind of a rounding error.

sokoloff 8y ago

AFAIK, Netflix does not stream out of AWS, but instead "just" runs their application services on AWS (which is still a significant workload). I seem to recall they offered a rack full of their own caching equipment to medium and larger ISPs (to save both sides streaming costs while providing better service to Netflix customers). Basically a private app-specific CDN.

fredsted 8y ago
It's true. If you open Web Inspector while streaming a Netflix movie, the URL it's getting the stream from probably contains your ISP name and region!

philg_jr 8y ago

Netflix maintains their own CDN for video content. They place a rack (multiple racks?) in many different datacenters close to the ISP last mile (possibly within some ISP's own datacenters?). https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

LaserToy 8y ago

Who knows,but I bet some sweet deal was involved. When Netflix started using AWS it wasn’t a thing, it was pretty bad datacenter. Even amazon.com wasn’t using aws (contrary to their marketing material).