Netflix Case Study on top of AWS
NETFLIX
Netflix is an American media services provider and production company headquartered in Los Gatos, California. Netflix was founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in California. The company’s business is its subscription-based streaming service which offers online streaming of a library of films and television series, including those produced in-house. in April 2020, Netflix had over 193 million paid subscriptions worldwide, including 73 million in the United States.
ABOUT AWS
AWS is a cloud company providing on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a pay-as-you-go model. These cloud computing web services provide a variety of IT infrastructure. AWS offering around 2,500+ services One of these services is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows users to have their virtual cluster of computers, available all the time, through the Internet. AWS’s version of virtual computers emulates most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) and for processing general things it provides RAM memory, hard-disk/SSD storage.
ABOUT THE CASE STUDY:
Netflix was originally a CD/DVD shipping business where they were providing DVDs of your chosen programs to you. This was going well until 2008 where they experienced a major database loss and for 3 days could not ship their DVDs to their customers. That was when the senior persons of Netflix realized that they had to shift from continuous vertical scaling which leads to single points of failure to a more reliable and scalable horizontal scaling system.
They chose AWS despite having Amazon as a competitor. Amazon has their own streaming service known as Amazon Prime because AWS provided them with the greatest scaling capabilities and the biggest set of available features. It took 7 years of migration for Netflix to shut down their last remaining data centers and move completely to the cloud.
Moving to the cloud has allowed Netflix to keep its existing members well engaged with overall viewing growing exponentially.
HOW NETFLIX USES AMAZON WEB SERVICES(AWS)
Netflix uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) for nearly all its computing and storage needs, including databases, analytics, recommendation engines, video transcoding, and many more hundreds of functions that in total use more than 100,000+ server instances on AWS.
SOME SERVICES OF AWS THAT USED BY NETFLIX
1.Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is a part of Amazon.com’s cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services, that allows users to use virtual computers on which they can run any type of computer application.
Netflix uses Amazon EC2 instance types and features to create a high- performance cloud, achieving near-bare-metal speed for its workloads.
2. Amazon Kinesis
Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data so you can get timely insights and react quickly to new information. Amazon Kinesis offers key capabilities to cost-effectively process streaming data at any scale, along with the flexibility to choose the tools that best suit the requirements of your application. With Amazon Kinesis, you can ingest real-time data such as video, audio, application logs, website clickstreams, and other applications
Netflix uses Amazon Kinesis to monitor the communications between all of its applications so it can detect and fix issues quickly, ensuring high service uptime and availability to its customers.
3. Amazon Elastic Transcoder
Transcoding is the process of converting an audio or video file from one encoding format to another in order to increase the number of compatible target devices a media file can be played on.
Amazon Elastic Transcoder is one service that manages all aspects of the media transcoding process for you transparently and automatically. There’s no need to administer software, scale hardware, tune performance, or otherwise manage transcoding infrastructure. You simply create a transcoding process by specifying your source media file and how you want it transcoded.
That’s why Netflix has many types of file formats for the same video as customer required
4. AWS Lambda
Netflix uses AWS Lambda is for its backup system. As thousands of files get changed and modified on a daily basis Lambdas is checking if the files need to be backed up, they check the validity and integrity of the files, and if anything fails they can backtrack to the source of the problem and restart the process.
5. AWS S3
Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web Services that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its global e-commerce network.
Netflix has only one file the original, raw movie file. That file is stored in an S3 object storage service, which splits and encrypts the file into separate chunks, storing the chunks in Amazon S3. This object storage service also handles content security, auditing, disaster recovery, and more.
Benefits of AWS to Netflix
- Processes and enriches multiple terabytes each day, representing billions of events, with sub-second response times for analytics queries
- Highly cost-efficient compared to competing solutions
- Freedom to experiment with system architecture to arrive at the most effective solution
- Data ingestion initiated with just a few simple API calls
- Highly elastic solution with close to 1,000 Amazon Kinesis shards working in parallel