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Can someone explain why Netflix's service is designed this way? By "this way" I mean, why are some devices served by some set of servers/services exclusively, a

Can someone explain why Netflix's service is designed this way? By "this way" I mean, why are some devices served by some set of servers/services exclusively, and apparently web browsers and other devices served in some other way? I'm not questioning if there's a good reason that it's done this way, but that reason just not obvious to me. I would have designed such a system where there is one endpoint which all clients hit, regardless of platform. But I have never designed the world's largest video streaming infrastructure.

berthamilton 14y ago
I recently attended a talk by netflix on building fault tolerant systems. From what I could tell, there wasn't an architecture, everything could talk to everything else, with a thin Api layer on top. The way they achieve fault tolerance is by not having an ops team, instead they have a resiliency team and monitor everything. This team uses various monkeys to try to break the application in different ways. They then put all developers on call, and force them to write code that can recover from faults by trying different methods to break it. tl;dr netflix systems are chaotic, because chaotic systems tend to tolerate failures.
- hga 14y ago
  Yes, building your approach around chaos monkeys (https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy) has some real advantages.
moe 14y ago
Not all devices support all streaming protocols and formats. I.e. their desktop player uses the proprietary SMPTE 421M codec (microsoft) which is not available (or efficiently implemented) on platforms where silverlight is not available (read: most of them). Since many of these other platforms also use proprietary formats they end up having to maintain a range of different proprietary streaming servers, many of which presumably need to interface with their respective mothership platform services (XBox live, PSN, Roku). Oh, and recently they have begun building their own CDN[1] which may add further to the diversity. [1] https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect
- seanp2k2 14y ago
  See also: http://gigaom.com/video/netflix-encoding/ http://gigaom.com/video/netflix-encoding/ and DRM schemes, esp. those detailed in content contracts (protip: big studios specify codecs, encryption specifics, etc.) Different for each device based on how much power the device has. TVs have nothing for CPU power in most cases.

berthamilton 14y ago

I recently attended a talk by netflix on building fault tolerant systems. From what I could tell, there wasn't an architecture, everything could talk to everything else, with a thin Api layer on top. The way they achieve fault tolerance is by not having an ops team, instead they have a resiliency team and monitor everything. This team uses various monkeys to try to break the application in different ways. They then put all developers on call, and force them to write code that can recover from faults by trying different methods to break it. tl;dr netflix systems are chaotic, because chaotic systems tend to tolerate failures.

hga 14y ago
Yes, building your approach around chaos monkeys (https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy) has some real advantages.

moe 14y ago

Not all devices support all streaming protocols and formats. I.e. their desktop player uses the proprietary SMPTE 421M codec (microsoft) which is not available (or efficiently implemented) on platforms where silverlight is not available (read: most of them). Since many of these other platforms also use proprietary formats they end up having to maintain a range of different proprietary streaming servers, many of which presumably need to interface with their respective mothership platform services (XBox live, PSN, Roku). Oh, and recently they have begun building their own CDN[1] which may add further to the diversity. [1] https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect

seanp2k2 14y ago
See also: http://gigaom.com/video/netflix-encoding/ http://gigaom.com/video/netflix-encoding/ and DRM schemes, esp. those detailed in content contracts (protip: big studios specify codecs, encryption specifics, etc.) Different for each device based on how much power the device has. TVs have nothing for CPU power in most cases.