NETFLIX AND AWS

Gauri Raskar
4 min readSep 22, 2020

What is netflix?🙄

ptfff…. of course you know What Netflix is, very stupid of me to even include this question here 😆 but still let me answer

Netflix is a streaming service that offers a wide variety of award-winning TV shows, movies, anime, documentaries and more — on thousands of internet-connected devices.

You can watch as much as you want(which we do 🤫), whenever you want, without a single ad — all for one low monthly price(yay….🤭). There’s always something new to discover(and for that we have a lot of free time), and new TV shows and movies are added every week!(wohooo🥳)

Let’s get serious now…🤓

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers — including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies — are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.

So why do you think Netflix moved to AWS(basically cloud)…..lets see!!

The cloud platform is the foundation and technology stack for the majority of the services within Netflix.

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.

Did you know, in the year 2000, the company Blockbuster LLC had an opportunity to buy Netflix for a mere $50 million? But in 2016, Netflix made a come back and accumulated $8.83 billion in revenue. One would wonder how come a company which was worth $50 million in 2000 is now worth around $87 billion.

On January 4, 2016, right before Netflix expanded itself into 130 new countries, Netflix Billing infrastructure became 100% AWS cloud-native.

Moving to the cloud has brought Netflix a number of benefits. They have eight times as many streaming members than They did in 2008, and they are much more engaged, with overall viewing growing by three orders of magnitude in eight years

Why AWS?

Netflix would have used any other cloud platform then why they use AWS…

The cost to run your own data center involves paying for a location, construction, staffing, security & disaster recovery across the globe. Managing and fronting the cost for physical data centers is a very costly and time consuming endeavor. Renting this capacity, virtually, from AWS is a faster way to get to market and a cheaper way to run a cloud business.

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.

Netflix was one of the very first companies to move their infrastructure over to AWS, and have since pioneered many of the common architectural patterns for designing products on AWS.

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 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.

Let’s talk money now….

Netflix talks openly about how it uses AWS to support its streaming platform, but how much Netflix spends on AWS has always been a secret. Until now.

Based on Netflix’s utilization of AWS, we estimate that Netflix spends around $9.6 million per month on AWS.

Like many companies that use AWS, Netflix spends the most on Amazon EC2 ($3 million/mo) and much less on AWS Elastic Load Balancer, Amazon CloudFront, and other AWS products

Conclusion :

As public cloud adoption continues to grow at a rapid pace, AWS has established itself as the dominant market leader in the space. Whether because of reliable security, pay per use flexibility, low IT expenditure, or partner relationship benefits – customers today are turning to AWS more and more for their cloud service needs. This gives companies using AWS the ability to be more agile, efficient and scalable – and manage their costs and limit unneeded infrastructure while doing so.

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.

Hope you find this blog useful and informative. Comment you thoughts below, Any feedback and comments are welcome.

Let’s learn and grow together. 🤩

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