Netflix’s Stupendous Migration to AWS
Back in 2008, Netflix was majorly working on DVD-by-mail service. Due to the above mentioned database corruption incident, DVD shipping was disrupted for three days. Netflix management decided to move to the cloud, away from relational systems in their data centers. The shift happened from vertical scaling of particular failure points to horizontal scaling of distributed systems which were highly reliable. The cloud was that of AWS (Amazon Web Services) which offered the company the ability to scale as much as they needed. Previously, Netflix team had to sit with their IT team to implement the scale up whenever their demand increased. Scalability was a huge issue with physical data warehousing. After shifting to AWS, scaling became seamless as petabytes of data could be used to stream videos within minutes, thanks to elasticity of the cloud. Based on user demand and with the help of AWS, Netflix could scale-up or down their data warehousing
Agility
Cloud agility refers to the rapid provisioning of computer-related resources. The Cloud environment can usually provide compute instances or storage in minutes. Before cloud providers took off with IaaS, one had to email infrastructure suppliers and wait for a few weeks before the supplier replied with the requested provisions. (Source: Netflix, Amazon Case Study on Netflix). The existing IaaS delivery is executed using the consoles of cloud providers, allowing a faster release of new features for users. The benefit of such services reduce the time taken to develop, test and deploy software applications.
Most successful companies share a common trait: they had people who started developing a product/service prototype way ahead of their peers. The reason for their success is rather obvious — the first-mover advantage. Cloud computing is a technology designed to help organizations obtain the first-mover advantage, as evident from their rich variety of service offerings.
How did Netflix utilize agility features of the cloud for the cloud migration of their operations? They rebuilt their app functions inside the native cloud development environments first, later including app development for business operations. The large, cumbersome Netflix service of 2008 was refactored into microservices and unstructured scalable databases.
Scalability
Scalability refers to a software-based product or service which retains its intended function with no quality compromise when moved to an environment with more incoming customers. The user’s needs must be met no matter what changes and the response time should not get longer. The elaborations below highlight the relevance of cloud scalability to your organization.
By using services from cloud providers like AWS and Open Connect (for streaming), Netflix expanded its network of servers (both physical and virtual) from North America to the rest of the world, including areas like Europe and India.
Netflix is one example of an organization using the cloud. By running on AWS, it provided billions hours of service to customers around the globe. Users can order its products/services from almost anywhere in the world, using PCs, tablets, or mobile devices. 10,000 customer orders were processed every second during Netflix’s last peak demand season. This is a stark contrast from the few thousand DVD orders Netflix could handle in its early days before streaming and migrating to the cloud. Having 86 million customers worldwide who consume 150 million hours of content daily, this is rather strong evidence about how the cloud has powered Netflix’s scalability of business operations.
Who is a DevOps Engineer?
Netflix itself admitted that it would have been extremely difficult to scale so much on its own data centers. It was in the process of shifting its huge streaming operations to AWS for all these years. In early January 2016, Netflix shut down its last data center which was used by their streaming service. Now, there are eight times more users for Netflix as compared to those present in 2008. This represents the phenomenal growth of Netflix over the years. The company 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. Have a look at how video is delivered to users by Netflix: It is through Open Connect. It is Netflix’s own Content Delivery Network (CDN) which it manages through Amazon. Videos that stream to a user are located in data centers within the networks of Internet service providers, facilities where traffic is exchanged among most of the network operators. The traffic is distributed directly to Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and similar network operators at such exchange points. When a user presses ‘play’ button, from these sites, videos get delivered to him.
Conclusion
Today, Netflix is the 10th largest Internet company in the world. Are you aware that during the peak traffic hours more than one-third of North American Internet traffic goes through Netflix’s systems? ‘Supporting such rapid growth would have been extremely difficult out of our own data centers; we simply could not have racked the servers fast enough,’ Netflix’s blog post says. It continues, ‘Elasticity of the cloud allows us to add thousands of virtual servers and petabytes of storage within minutes, making such an expansion possible.’ So, that is the power of Amazon Web Services propelling one of the most ambitious companies on earth, Netflix, into uncharted territory and runaway success!
