Netflix : Play and Watch. Iam quite confident that you must be…
By: Ritvik Arya
Tags: Videos, Oca, Netflix, Médium, Cloud Computing

Iam quite confident that you must be having a Netflix subscription either free or paid. It’s very easy to stream a video on Netflix. Open the application choose the video and hit the play button. Depending on your internet connectivity and country in which you reside will affect the loading time preferably. Did you ever think how Netflix made video streaming so easy?

Netflix, 10th largest internet company by revenue.

Netflix was not always this smooth and efficient at video streaming. It was through time and growing demand , Netflix decided to modify itself and to go all cloud.

When Netflix had data centres.

In 2007 when Netflix started their online video streaming service they used ORACLE database as the back-end,their relational database management system. A centralised database management system which had only one point of failure. “We had a single data centre, which meant we had a single point of failure” explains Adrian Cockcroft, cloud architect at Netflix.

“We were approaching limits on trafﬁc and capacity. Now that people can watch Netflix streaming programming from their phones, from Wii devices, Roku boxes, and many others, the demand for availability increases all the time. We have more customers every quarter, more customers are using streaming, and they’re using streaming at a greater rate.”

Netflix logo from 2004 to 2014

Fears of Adrian came true in 2008. Netflix was running relational databases in its own data centres when disaster struck. A data centre failure shut the entire service down and stopped DVD shipments for three days. Using a centralised DBMS posed great challenges to the administration. They had two options. Either to develop world class data centres, which was used and are in use by many highly scalable web applications or shift to cloud.

Rapid growth of Netflix with million of users generating huge amount of data everyday and tons of videos being uploaded everyday made the choice easy for Netflix. Shifting to cloud seemed an efficient and scalable approach. Cloud made it possible to store petabytes and run thousands of virtual servers.

AWS , Netflix and JAVA.

Netflix had only few options back then which could support it’s huge technical empire. Amazon Web Services(AWS) is reliable, flexible and efficient that can handle all the functionalities of Netflix. Netflix started building its infrastructure from scratch on AWS. Netflix powers through 2 billion content requests per day with Java-driven architecture. Java’s innate scalability has played a key role in enabling Netflix to expand its service to more than 57 million members in 50 countries. Never under estimate the power old rather classic object oriented languages like Java or C++. They still drive a lot of companies at backend and provide a reliable base to develop applications.

“The vast majority of the services running within our architecture are built on Java and the Java Virtual Machine [JVM],” says Andrew Glover, delivery engineering manager at Netflix.”

Amazon although has its online video streaming platform : Amazon Prime Video so why does AWS support Netflix? Answer being simple.

First, Netflix being one of the top clients of AWS pays them a handsome amount to run Netflix services on their machine. Secondly Netflix is itself a very big system to support and to run its services on cloud also poses challenge for AWS helping them to test their limits and improve their services. And third reason being a sensible one. You just don’t turn down offers from where you know ,you will earn profit.