How Netflix Migrated To The AWS Cloud To Scale For 260 Million Viewers
The story of how Netflix migrated to the AWS to be more scalable.
Netflix is one of the world’s leading entertainment services with over 260 million members in more than 190 countries. [1]
The streaming platform business uses AWS for nearly all of its IT needs.
Ranging from storing its video content to sending emails, processing, and streaming video, and even caching content near end users, all of it is done with the AWS cloud.
But Netflix didn’t always have this high-end setup.
The Story Of Netflix
It is a lesser-known fact that Netflix started off as a DVD delivery business back in 2008.
Yes, as crude as it sounds, they didn’t start by providing streaming services online.
They went the old-fashioned way. Customers would place orders to their DVD catalog and Netflix would satisfy their orders by delivering the DVD directly by mail to the customers.
Of course that went well until their customer base grew.
After a certain point, they realized they couldn’t satisfy the growing demands of consumers and they moved to the streaming business.
With streaming services on-demand, suddenly requests grew 1000x that of the peak DVD delivery demands.
This was due to the fact that customers were now able to watch as many videos as they wanted and binge-watch all sorts of titles any day of the week on demand.
Naturally, this posed a problem in terms of scalability.
Netflix had already experienced hardware failures in the past which interrupted their workloads for days at a time and so they made the decision to move to the AWS cloud.
Netflix On AWS
To run all their required workloads, like video transcoding and batch log processing, Netflix made use of 300 EC2 instances which they were able to acquire within an hour only [2].
To log the quality of their service they needed scalable storage — Amazon S3 — since they couldn’t manage such large datasets in their own data centers.
Netflix set the goal for all of its infrastructure to be moved to AWS by the end of 2010.
During the migration, which they had going incrementally, instead of redirecting all customers to their cloud infrastructure, they redirected some to the cloud and some to their legacy infrastructure so as not to overwhelm either system.
In 2011, they settled on a decision and a plan to move the entire backend to AWS.
They needed to move their database to the cloud and set up a backup strategy in case anything went wrong.
Instead of having off-site tape backups, they had this strategy where they created separate accounts in different regions and replicated the data to these accounts.
Finally, a few years later their entire data center had been migrated to the AWS cloud.
They now had data resiliency, high availability, and on-demand and unlimited computing capacity.
Since then AWS has provided Netflix with every infrastructure service and tools they have ever needed, ranging from computing resources to storage and the capabilities to scale massively and securely.
Additionally, with the capability of being highly available across the world, AWS has allowed Netflix to become the world’s leading content producer.
Netflix has also been able to build a studio in the cloud, thanks to AWS.
This virtual studio enables Netflix to engage top artistic talent, no matter the location, and Netflix artists and partners have the freedom to collaborate without technological or geographical barriers. [1]
How Netflix Scales High
With rapid access to unlimited EC2 instances and high availability in different regions of the world, Netflix has been able to scale massively in the cloud to meet their end users’ ever growing needs.
When they need capacity they can provision instances in mere minutes and then release them when they no longer need them allowing them to maintain optimal efficiency.
With various tools like auto-scaling groups and elastic load balancer, Netflix can achieve scalability with cost-effectiveness.
Combined with the ability to innovate rapidly with the cloud, Netflix offers a stellar experience in most regions in the world serving hundreds of millions of customers with very rare service interruptions.
Conclusion
Netflix’s migration to AWS has been instrumental in scaling its services to accommodate over 260 million viewers worldwide.
By leveraging AWS’s robust infrastructure, Netflix can efficiently manage vast amounts of data, ensure high availability, and innovate rapidly.
This strategic move has enabled Netflix to provide a seamless and reliable streaming experience, solidifying its position as a global leader in entertainment.
👋 My name is Uriel Bitton and I hope you learned something of value in this article of The Serverless Spotlight.
🔗 Please consider sharing it with your network to help others learn as well.
😍 You can also explore my social media links here:
✍️ *my blog website is coming soon, so stay tuned for that.
🙌 I hope to see you in the next week's edition!
Uriel