Introduction
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 trans coding, and more—hundreds of functions that in total use more than 100,000 server instances on AWS.
What Is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing refers to any kind of hosted service delivered over the internet. These services often include servers, databases, software, networks, analytics and other computing functions that can be operated through the cloud.
Files and programs stored in the cloud can be accessed anywhere by users on the service, eliminating the need to always be near physical hardware. In the past, for example, user-created documents and spreadsheets had to be saved to a physical hard drive, USB drive or disk. Without some kind of hardware component, the files were completely inaccessible outside the computer they originated on. Thanks to the cloud, few people worry anymore about fried hard drives or lost or corrupted USB drives. Cloud computing makes the documents available everywhere because the data actually lives on a network of hosted servers that transmit data over the internet.
How Cloud Computing working???
The cloud is basically a decentralized place to share information through satellite networks. Every cloud application has a host, and the hosting company is responsible for maintaining the massive data centers that provide the security, storage capacity and computing power needed to maintain all of the information users send to the cloud.
The most prominent companies hosting the cloud are major players like Amazon (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft (Azure), Apple (i Cloud) and Google (Google Drive), but there's also a plethora of other players, large and small. These hosting companies can sell the rights to use their clouds and store data on their networks, while also offering the end user an ecosystem that can communicate between devices and programs (e.g., download a song on your laptop and it's instantly synced to the iTunes software on your iPhone).
Leader in Cloud Computing
An article written last May in Forbes discussed a Gartner Report that estimated
AWS has more than ten times the computing capacity of the next 14 largest infrastructure vendors combined. AWS has multiple data centers located across the globe.
AWS has 77 Availability Zones within 12 cloud regions.
The company has announced plans to add an additional 11 Availability Zones in 5 more geographic regions throughout the next year.
Whether you’re a small business looking to optimize your IT infrastructure or a multi-national corporation in need of salable, international cloud processing – AWS has a cloud infrastructure to meet all of your needs
Problem face by Netflix before using AWS (Amazon Web Services)
Netflix recently published an article describing the completion of billing migration to Amazon Web Services. More than half of the services including all the customer-facing services of Netflix were moved to the cloud before 2015.
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.
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 looking 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 to administration tool for a secure and salable 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.
After the connection with AWS
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.
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!
Thanks for reading