AWS — NETFLIX
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon providing on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. The genesis of AWS was when in the early 2000s, experience with building Merchant.com, Amazon’s e-commerce-as-a-service platform for third-party retailers to build their own web-stores, made them pursue service-oriented architecture as a means to scale their engineering operations led by the then CTO, Allan Vermeulen.
Netflix, Inc. is an American over-the-top content platform and production company headquartered in Los Gatos, California. Netflix was founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California. The company’s primary business is a subscription-based streaming service offering online streaming from a library of films and television series, including those produced in-house. In January 2021, Netflix reached 203.7 million subscribers, including 73 million in the United States.
Netflix Inc.’s corporate mission is “To entertain the world.” This mission statement is based on the nature of the company in providing on-demand movie streaming services.
HOW NETFLIX USES AWS ?
Netflix uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) for nearly all its computing and storage needs, including databases, analytics, recommendation engines, video transcoding, and more — hundreds of functions that in total use more than 100,000 server instances on AWS.
This results in an extremely complex and dynamic networking environment where applications are constantly communicating inside AWS and across the Internet. Monitoring and optimizing its network is critical for Netflix to continue improving customer experience, increasing efficiency, and reducing costs. In particular, Netflix needed a solution for ingesting, augmenting, and analyzing the multiple terabytes of data its network generates daily in the form of virtual private cloud (VPC) flow logs. This would enable Netflix to identify performance-improvement opportunities, such as identifying apps that are communicating across regions and collocating them. The company would also be able to increase uptime by quickly detecting and mitigating application downtime.
Each log record carries information about the communications between two IP addresses. However, in a dynamic environment like the one at Netflix, where an IP address can float between applications from day to day or even minute to minute, IP addresses alone don’t have much meaning. “The data sources we had before we took on this initiative were one sided,” says John Bennett, senior software engineer at Netflix. “We’d know an application was connecting to others, but we didn’t know both sides of the conversation and how to optimize those communications or the placement of the applications on the network.”
Netflix set out to establish a new data source that could give it more insight into communication among applications and regions by combining VPC flow logs with application metadata.
Architecture diagram :
Benefits of AWS :
- 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
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