How Netflix Uses Serverless Services For Content Streaming
How Netflix optimizes performance and efficiency with cloud serverless AWS services.
I recently wrote an article about how Netflix used the AWS cloud to run their gargantuan infrastructure and is able to scale and be highly available to over 260 million users across 190 countries.
You can read more of that here.
In this article, I’ll focus on 4 ways which Netflix uses serverless services for their IT operations which allow them to run multiple services and transactions without managing servers.
Netflix’s Infrastructure
Netflix has petabytes of data being processed daily and they deliver over 10 billion hours of videos to hundreds of millions of customers daily.
While they still provision thousands of servers per month for constant IT operations, some of their operations run without servers.
Using serverless services for some transactions lightens the load on the servers that Netflix runs on the AWS cloud.
4 Ways Netflix Uses Serverless Services
1. Video Encoding
When content publishers on Netflix upload content, it needs to be encoded and restructured before the content is ready to be streamed by users.
The way Netflix manages these content uploads, often in the thousands daily, is by using an AWS Lambda function that reacts to events of files being uploaded to Amazon S3 and breaking up the file upload into a multi-part upload of 5-minute segments.
Once every part is uploaded and encoded, they are sorted and aggregated together to form the content that is ready to be deployed and streamed by viewers.
Lambda allows you to react to all sorts of events externally, and one of the optimal use cases of Lambda is to trigger code when a file is uploaded to S3.
This entire process runs completely serverless, allowing Netflix to benefit by removing the need to provision and manage servers for every video content upload.
2. Backups
Another way Netflix uses serverless and Lambda functions is for backups.
As thousands of files get uploaded to Netflix every day, Netflix needs a system to backup these files.
Under the hood, Lambda is constantly checking file changes for which of them need to be backed up.
A Lambda function also verifies if a file is valid, checking for valid or supported file types.
3. Manage Access
Netflix runs thousands of processes that start and stop instances all the time and they use Lambda to validate that instances are configured in a manner that abides by their system’s regulations.
Lambda functions are also used to create alerts and to shut down an instance in the event of any unauthorized access.
4. Marketing Emails
Netflix sends out hundreds of millions of emails daily to their customers.
Ranging from marketing emails to personalized content emails for new and old customers, Netflix needs a highly scalable way to send out mass emails and be able to track analytics for open and bounce rates.
For this, they use Amazon SES or Simple Email Service.
SES allows Netflix to send out millions of emails daily without managing a single server — a process that has helped Netflix grow enormously in recent times.
With SES, Netflix is able to track email recipient behaviors and build a high sender reputation.
Conclusion
In the article, I discuss how Netflix leverages AWS cloud serverless services to manage its infrastructure, scaling effortlessly to serve millions of users globally.
I focus on four key serverless strategies employed by Netflix:
Video encoding with AWS Lambda for efficient content uploads
Automated file backups
Instance management to ensure compliance and security
Scalable email distribution using Amazon SES.
These serverless solutions reduce the need for extensive server management, simplifying Netflix’s operations and contributing to its efficient system, providing a stellar user experience.
👋 My name is Uriel Bitton and I’m committed to helping you master AWS, Cloud Computing, and Serverless development. ☁️
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