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Right? A common complaint by outsiders is that Netflix uses microservices. I'd love to hear exactly how a monolith application is guaranteed to perform better,

Right? A common complaint by outsiders is that Netflix uses microservices. I'd love to hear exactly how a monolith application is guaranteed to perform better, with details. What is the magic difference that would have ensured the live stream would have been successful?

miked85 2y ago
It's not guaranteed, but much fewer points of failure.
- chipdart 2y ago
  > It's not guaranteed, but much fewer points of failure. Can you explain where this is relevant to buffering issues? Also, you are very wrong regarding failure modes. The larger the service, the more failure modes it has. Moreover, in monoliths if a failure mode can take down/degrade the whole service, all other features are taken down/degraded. Is having a single failure mode that brings down the whole service what you call fewer points of failure?
  - miked85 2y ago
    I can't, since I don't know Netflix's architecture - I was responding to "I'd love to hear exactly how a monolith application is guaranteed to perform better, with details."
    - chipdart 2y ago
      > I was responding to "I'd love to hear exactly how a monolith application is guaranteed to perform better, with details." I asked nothing about Netflix. My question was directed at your remark regarding monoliths vs microservices. Now, can you answer the question?
      - miked85 2y ago
        Monoliths might be better in some cases, microservices in others. Performance can obviously differ based on implementation.
leptons 2y ago
I doubt a "microservice" has anything to do with delivering the video frames. There are specific kinds of infrastructure tech that are specifically designed to serve live video to large amounts of clients. If they are in fact using a "microservice" to deliver video frames, then I'd ask them to have their heads examined. Microservices are typically used to do mundane short-lived tasks, not deliver video.
- dartos 2y ago
  There’s very likely a dedicated service for delivering frames. That’s service would technically be a “microservice” even if it is a large service.
  - shermantanktop 2y ago
    Why is that “very likely”? I’m genuinely curious about the reasoning behind that statement. It’s very possible that you are using a different set of assumptions or definitions than I am.
    - dartos 2y ago
      I say that because, for performance reasons, you’d never want to wait on potentially several hops to stream media and because the act of streaming could very well be a good enough domain boundary.
      - PeterStuer 2y ago
        I'm fairly well versed in basic ip networks, but the above sounds like a wordsalad to me.
        dartos 2y ago
        That’s okay, you probably just haven’t worked with high performance services or micro services before. Network requests (sometimes called hops) take a significant amount of time. You don’t want your streaming service to take a significant amounts of time. In microservices land, you generally try making services based on some “domain” (metaphorical, not like a literal domain name) which defines the responsibility of any given service. Defining these domains is more art than science and depends on the business needs and each team. Video streaming might be one of those domains for Netflix.
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
I am one of the ones who complain about their microservices architecture quite a lot. This comes from both first-hand experience of talking to several of their directors when consulted upon on how to make certain systems of theirs better. It's not just a matter of guarantees, it's a matter of complexity. Like right now Google search is dying and there's nothing that they can do to fix it because they have given up control. The same thing happened with Netflix where they wanted to push too hard to be a tech company and have their tech blogs filled with interesting things. On the back end they went too deep on the microservices complexity. And on the front end for a long time they suffered with their whole RxJS problem. So it's not an objective matter of what's better. It's more cultural problem at Netflix. Plus the fact that they want to be associated with "Faang" and yet their product is not really technology based.
- kjellsbells 2y ago
  > they want to be associated with "Faang" and yet their product is not really technology based. You lost me. Netflix built a massive CDN, a recommendation engine, did dynamic transcoding of video, and a bunch of other things, at scale, quite some years before everyone else. They may have enshittified in the last five years, but I dont see any reason why they dont have a genuinely legitimate claim to being a founder member of the FAANG club. I have a much harder time believing that companies with AI in their name or domain are doing any kind of AI, by contrast.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
    Pornhub has better, more reliable technology than Netflix, yet you don't see their tech blog very often do you?
    - always_imposter 2y ago
      fair. I have always wondered how do they deliver their content and what goes on behind the scenes and nobody on tech twitter or even youtubers talk about pornhub's infra for some reason. A lot of the innovation in tech has roots in people wanting to see high quality tiddies on the internet.

miked85 2y ago

It's not guaranteed, but much fewer points of failure.

chipdart 2y ago
> It's not guaranteed, but much fewer points of failure. Can you explain where this is relevant to buffering issues? Also, you are very wrong regarding failure modes. The larger the service, the more failure modes it has. Moreover, in monoliths if a failure mode can take down/degrade the whole service, all other features are taken down/degraded. Is having a single failure mode that brings down the whole service what you call fewer points of failure?
- miked85 2y ago
  I can't, since I don't know Netflix's architecture - I was responding to "I'd love to hear exactly how a monolith application is guaranteed to perform better, with details."
  - chipdart 2y ago
    > I was responding to "I'd love to hear exactly how a monolith application is guaranteed to perform better, with details." I asked nothing about Netflix. My question was directed at your remark regarding monoliths vs microservices. Now, can you answer the question?
    - miked85 2y ago
      Monoliths might be better in some cases, microservices in others. Performance can obviously differ based on implementation.

leptons 2y ago

I doubt a "microservice" has anything to do with delivering the video frames. There are specific kinds of infrastructure tech that are specifically designed to serve live video to large amounts of clients. If they are in fact using a "microservice" to deliver video frames, then I'd ask them to have their heads examined. Microservices are typically used to do mundane short-lived tasks, not deliver video.

dartos 2y ago
There’s very likely a dedicated service for delivering frames. That’s service would technically be a “microservice” even if it is a large service.
- shermantanktop 2y ago
  Why is that “very likely”? I’m genuinely curious about the reasoning behind that statement. It’s very possible that you are using a different set of assumptions or definitions than I am.
  - dartos 2y ago
    I say that because, for performance reasons, you’d never want to wait on potentially several hops to stream media and because the act of streaming could very well be a good enough domain boundary.
    - PeterStuer 2y ago
      I'm fairly well versed in basic ip networks, but the above sounds like a wordsalad to me.
      - dartos 2y ago
        That’s okay, you probably just haven’t worked with high performance services or micro services before. Network requests (sometimes called hops) take a significant amount of time. You don’t want your streaming service to take a significant amounts of time. In microservices land, you generally try making services based on some “domain” (metaphorical, not like a literal domain name) which defines the responsibility of any given service. Defining these domains is more art than science and depends on the business needs and each team. Video streaming might be one of those domains for Netflix.

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago

I am one of the ones who complain about their microservices architecture quite a lot. This comes from both first-hand experience of talking to several of their directors when consulted upon on how to make certain systems of theirs better. It's not just a matter of guarantees, it's a matter of complexity. Like right now Google search is dying and there's nothing that they can do to fix it because they have given up control. The same thing happened with Netflix where they wanted to push too hard to be a tech company and have their tech blogs filled with interesting things. On the back end they went too deep on the microservices complexity. And on the front end for a long time they suffered with their whole RxJS problem. So it's not an objective matter of what's better. It's more cultural problem at Netflix. Plus the fact that they want to be associated with "Faang" and yet their product is not really technology based.

kjellsbells 2y ago
> they want to be associated with "Faang" and yet their product is not really technology based. You lost me. Netflix built a massive CDN, a recommendation engine, did dynamic transcoding of video, and a bunch of other things, at scale, quite some years before everyone else. They may have enshittified in the last five years, but I dont see any reason why they dont have a genuinely legitimate claim to being a founder member of the FAANG club. I have a much harder time believing that companies with AI in their name or domain are doing any kind of AI, by contrast.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  Pornhub has better, more reliable technology than Netflix, yet you don't see their tech blog very often do you?
  - always_imposter 2y ago
    fair. I have always wondered how do they deliver their content and what goes on behind the scenes and nobody on tech twitter or even youtubers talk about pornhub's infra for some reason. A lot of the innovation in tech has roots in people wanting to see high quality tiddies on the internet.