AWS-Netflix Case Study
Netflix currently streams about 150,000,000 hours of video content per day. It serves around 86,000,000 members from 190 countries across the world. Back in 2000 Netflix net worth was about $50 million and now worths around US$1.866 billion (2019). Company has impressive growth in past two decades but the actual fact is that within this time period, in the 2008, Netflix was a victim of a major database corruption. This let to the migration of Netflix to AWS.
In 2008, Netflix was working on DVD-by-mail service. Database corruption incident led to the disruption of DVD shipping for three days. Netflix management decided to move to the cloud, away from relational systems in their data centres. The shift happened from vertical scaling of particular failure points and horizontal scaling of distributed systems which were reliable. AWS offered perfect requirement for scaling the resources. Previously, Netflix team had to work with the IT team to implement the scale up whenever their demand increased. After shifting to AWS, scaling became easy as petabytes of data could be used to stream videos within minutes, owing to elasticity of the cloud. Warehousing was scaled up and down as per the requirements.
How is the Video streamed by Neflix using AWS?
Video is delivered through Open Connect which is Netflix’s own Content Delivery Network (CDN) managed through Amazon. Videos that stream to a user are located in data centers within the networks of Internet service providers.
When a user presses ‘play’ button, from these sites, videos get delivered to him. Before a video gets delivered to him, operations like searching for videos and signing up by the user for the service are all handled in AWS cloud. Business logic, personalization, search, and data processing which gives the streaming experience are all live in AWS. They rebuilt their entire software platform to leverage AWS cloud network to the maximum. ‘Chaos Monkey’ is a series of tools developed by Netflix To reduce damage in the case of disruptions Netflix built tool known as Chaos Monkey. The company has enough backups of all data which is stored in Amazon itself.
The distributed database, Cassandra is chosen to store customer data where resources are replicated as per need in production. The primary backups of all data are placed in S3 (Simple Storage Service).
Conclusion
Today, Netflix is the 10th largest Internet company in the world. Did you know that during the traffic hours more than one-third of North American Internet traffic goes through Netflix’s systems? Elasticity of the cloud allows us to add thousands of virtual servers and petabytes of storage in very less time. That is the power of Amazon Web Services!