3 ms·

I always find it funny that Netflix is considered a poster child of "all cloud all the time." If you look at Netflix's architecture, it actually uses the cloud

I always find it funny that Netflix is considered a poster child of "all cloud all the time." If you look at Netflix's architecture, it actually uses the cloud in a very cost-effective way. They mostly deploy containers rather than using "cloudy" things like serverless, and Netflix's data plane is actually mostly their own CDN (Open Connect CDN), deployed in colo facilities around the world. By data volume, I would guess that only 1% of Netflix's traffic (measured in gigabits per second) actually hits their cloud, if even that.

scarface_74 3y ago
Just for reference: you are replying to someone who spent 3 years at AWS (Professional Services)…. I can tell you just from digging into the publicly available videos let alone some of the not publicly available information that you are greatly underestimating the complexity and costs of Netflix’s architecture. You can even spend some time watching some of the interviews about Netflix’s transition from their own data centers to AWS and their reasons. And before you accuse me of being a fanboy or shill. I got Amazoned last year. I have no love loss for Amazon as a former employee
- coldtea 3y ago
  >I can tell you just from digging into the publicly available videos let alone some of the not publicly available information that you are greatly underestimating the complexity and costs of Netflix’s architecture. Why do they need all that complexity to host a bunch of (not even that many) videos and user profiling?
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Search for Netflix’s reinvent talks on YouTube
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  I agree with you that Netflix's architecture in the cloud is incredibly complex. I know they do a lot of cool things with cloud storage, for example, but also scale breeds complexity. However, complexity is not scale. Netflix users reportedly stream about 200 million hours per day, and at 1 GB/hour, that's an egress of 200 Petabytes/hour, or about 5 exabytes per day. There is no reason for Netflix to pay AWS to handle that, and they don't. That would be $100 million per day from CloudFront. You can read about their data plane online: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ If you count how much data goes to their cloud vs their CDN appliances, I would be surprised if the cloud gets very much of their actual scale at all.

scarface_74 3y ago

Just for reference: you are replying to someone who spent 3 years at AWS (Professional Services)…. I can tell you just from digging into the publicly available videos let alone some of the not publicly available information that you are greatly underestimating the complexity and costs of Netflix’s architecture. You can even spend some time watching some of the interviews about Netflix’s transition from their own data centers to AWS and their reasons. And before you accuse me of being a fanboy or shill. I got Amazoned last year. I have no love loss for Amazon as a former employee

coldtea 3y ago
>I can tell you just from digging into the publicly available videos let alone some of the not publicly available information that you are greatly underestimating the complexity and costs of Netflix’s architecture. Why do they need all that complexity to host a bunch of (not even that many) videos and user profiling?
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Search for Netflix’s reinvent talks on YouTube
pclmulqdq 3y ago
I agree with you that Netflix's architecture in the cloud is incredibly complex. I know they do a lot of cool things with cloud storage, for example, but also scale breeds complexity. However, complexity is not scale. Netflix users reportedly stream about 200 million hours per day, and at 1 GB/hour, that's an egress of 200 Petabytes/hour, or about 5 exabytes per day. There is no reason for Netflix to pay AWS to handle that, and they don't. That would be $100 million per day from CloudFront. You can read about their data plane online: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ If you count how much data goes to their cloud vs their CDN appliances, I would be surprised if the cloud gets very much of their actual scale at all.