How Netflix Grow with the Help of AWS cloud services?

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.

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.

Benefits of Amazon AWS For Tech Startups

By choosing Amazon AWS for startups, tech startup owners discover a wide range of computing, database management, and maintenance tools that improve the efficiency, security, and scalability of their web platforms.

• Helps to Setup With Low Fundings. Using Amazon AWS pay As We Go Model Helps the startup which has low funding to starts their business. This model really helps a lot and reduces the cost of buying a huge amount of expensive hardware.
• Increasing operating efficiency. Using Amazon for startups helps business owners automate routine tasks and make it easier to access data anytime across different devices. Thanks to AWS CodeDeploy and other development tools, software engineers can automate routine coding tasks.
• Facilitates server management. Tools like AWS Migration Hub and AWS Server Migration Service help streamline server migration and database management. AWS LightSail is another tool that facilitates launching and managing private servers.
• Task automation. Speaking of tech automation and AWS, the benefits of Cloud formation come in the clear. The tool allows developers to automatically manage cross-region accounts, run locale expansion, etc.
• Improves collaboration for distributed teams. AWS offers tools that allow distributed teams to access resources on the go, offers operational insights, and facilitates decision-making by offering data to back up your points.
• Robust knowledge base. AWS has easy-to-manage documentation, with step-by-step tutorials on every tool for company owners. Other than offering text-based tutorials, there are multiple video tutorials in the Knowledge Center subtitled in different languages.
• Affordable pricing. The platform makes sure that SME owners can find the most convenient AWS services for startups cost. Tools like AWS Cost Explorer and Budgets help company managers create personalized pricing plans and ensure they are not paying for redundant tools. With AWS credit for startups, business owners can save up to 70% on computing power.
• Wide range of tools. AWS has everything a business owner needs to scale — from development and data management suites to content delivery, automation, IoT, and robotics features.

According to John Bennett Senior Software Engineer, Netflix :

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams processes multiple terabytes of log data each day, yet events show up in our analytics in seconds. We can discover and respond to issues in real-time, ensuring high availability and great customer experience.

Let’s Know Why Netflix decided to migrate to AWS?

In early January 2016, Netflix completed their cloud migration and have shut down the last remaining data center bits used by their streaming service. This has prompted numerous opinions on the viability of hosting on a cloud platform, irrespective of the extent of the business operations.

Let us take a look at what were the driving forces behind Netflix’s decision.

Why AWS for Netflix?

Netflix started off as a DVD subscription service and later moved on to the digital platform. In the early days as a DVD subscription service, Netflix had encountered a major database corruption that witnessed a delay of three days in delivering DVDs to the customers. In any business, it is important to avert bad customer experience to scale up and build a trusted business model.

This was the moment when Netflix considered to look for a database platform that could help in overcoming some of the critical issues, mainly minimizing downtime.

The cloud platform — AWS, in Netflix’s case — provides a range of benefits to organizations, irrespective of their sizes and extent of their operations. For instance, AWS provides an easy administration tool for a secure and scalable workflow.

When Netflix migrated to AWS, the cloud platform provided them with the necessary ammunition to grow the company’s operations rapidly and helped them sustain that growth.

How did AWS help?

Netflix is currently present in 190 countries. It becomes imperative to avert bad customer experience while migrating to a new service. And that’s what Amazon web services provided them. The elasticity of the cloud platform allowed them to add 1000s of virtual servers within a matter of a few minutes. They were able to expand their services to all the countries with minimal or rather negligible issues.

Leveraging multiple AWS cloud regions across geographies enabled Netflix to dynamically shift and expand their global infrastructure capacity across all countries they are present in. This provided for a brilliant customer experience wherein entertainment provided by Netflix continued to rule, uninterrupted.

As shown in the diagram, Netflix witnessed a tremendous increase in streaming hours from 2008 onwards. This was complemented by the company’s decision to migrate to the cloud.

On the other side, Netflix’s costs were cutting down to fractions per server. This not only helped them save money but also created an opportunity for them to add more resource-hungry features.

Conclusion

Amazon Web Services offers a range of benefits that help companies to be future-ready and optimize the workflow for scaling up their business operations. For a company of Netflix’s range of operations, moving to the cloud platform is the next logical step. The platform will help them in effective database monitoring and address any issues that stumble upon at any point in time. We believe AWS not only provides for reduced costs but also enables better infrastructure capabilities for the companies.