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

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.