Netflix's world-class infrastructure handles over 260 million subscribers and billions of hours of content monthly, relying on cloud-native architecture and a custom CDN for global delivery.
Evolution: Originating as a DVD rental service, Netflix transitioned to AWS in 2008 for scalability and resilience, moving to a microservices-based ecosystem.
Architecture: Netflix operates entirely on AWS, utilizing services like EC2, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, and CloudFront for deployment, storage, and content delivery.
Microservices: Netflix runs over a thousand microservices that communicate through REST, gRPC, and Kafka for scalability and decoupling.
Video Pipeline: Netflix's streaming pipeline encodes videos in various formats, optimizing content delivery through a custom CDN called Open Connect for low latency.
Personalization: Netflix leverages machine learning for personalized recommendations, conducting extensive A/B testing to enhance user experience.
Observability: Netflix ensures reliability through chaos engineering tools like Chaos Monkey, and monitoring systems like Atlas, Zipkin, and ELK Stack.
Global Availability: Netflix deploys across AWS regions, smartly routing requests to nearest servers for low latency and adaptive streaming.
Developer Tooling: Netflix empowers developers with Spinnaker and Titus for safe deployments, and follows strict security measures for data protection.
Conclusion: Netflix's infrastructure showcases cloud-native engineering excellence, providing insights for building scalable and intelligent systems.