Netflix Case Study On AWS

Rahul Kumar
4 min readMar 8, 2021

--

How Netflix uses Amazon Web Services.

What Is Amazon Web Services(AWS)?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully-featured services from data centers globally. if you’re looking for compute power, database storage, content delivery, or other functionality, AWS has the services to help you build sophisticated applications with increased flexibility, scalability, and reliability.

AWS Offers :

Amazon Web Services offers a broad set of global cloud-based products including compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, mobile, developer tools, management tools, IoT, security and enterprise applications.

These services help organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale. AWS is trusted by the largest enterprises and the hottest start-ups to power a wide variety of workloads including: web and mobile applications, game development, data processing and warehousing, storage, archive, and many others.

Netflix on AWS

About Netflix :

Netflix is the world’s leading internet television network, with more than 100 million members in more than 190 countries enjoying 125 million hours of TV shows and movies each day.

Netflix Uses Aws Services : —

Netflix uses 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.

Netflix runs in 2 regions and 12 availability zones of AWS.

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.

SERVICES OF AWS USED BY NETFLIX :

  1. Amazon EC2 :

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud.

Netflix uses Amazon EC2 instance types and features to create a high- performance cloud, achieving near-bare-metal speed for its workloads

2.Amazon S3:

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

Netflix uses Amazon S3 to store the raw data(movie,videos file) in object storage. It also store updatation of data in backup process.

3.Amazon Lambda:

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers, creating workload-aware cluster scaling logic, maintaining event integrations, or managing runtimes.

Netflix uses Lambda to execute rule-based checks and routing to handle data stored in S3. Whenever a piece of data is written to S3, a Lambda function decides which data needs to be backed up, which needs to be stored offsite. It then validates if the data has reached its destination, or if an alarm needs to be triggered.

4. Amazon Kinesis :

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.

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.

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

Thank you for reading……

--

--