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Desiderato Merriwether
I pulled this chapter together from dozens of sources that were at times somewhat contradictory. Facts on the ground change over time and depend who is telling the story and what audience they're addressing. I tried to create as coherent a narrative as I could. If there are any errors I'd be more than happy to fix them. Keep in mind this article is not a technical deep dive. It's a big picture type article. For example, I don't mention the word microservice even once :-)
Given our discussion in the What is Cloud Computing? chapter, you might expect Netflix to serve video using AWS. Press play in a Netflix application and video stored in S3 would be streamed from S3, over the internet, directly to your device.
Another relevant factoid is Netflix is subscription based. Members pay Netflix monthly and can cancel at any time. When you press play to chill on Netflix, it had better work. Unhappy members unsubscribe.
The client is the user interface on any device used to browse and play Netflix videos. It could be an app on your iPhone, a website on your desktop computer, or even an app on your Smart TV. Netflix controls each and every client for each and every device.
Everything that happens before you hit play happens in the backend, which runs in AWS. That includes things like preparing all new incoming video and handling requests from all apps, websites, TVs, and other devices.
In 2007 Netflix introduced their streaming video-on-demand service that allowed subscribers to stream television series and films via the Netflix website on personal computers, or the Netflix software on a variety of supported platforms, including smartphones and tablets, digital media players, video game consoles, and smart TVs.
Netflix succeeded. Netflix certainly executed well, but they were late to the game, and that helped them. By 2007 the internet was fast enough and cheap enough to support streaming video services. That was never the case before. The addition of fast, low-cost mobile bandwidth and the introduction of powerful mobile devices like smart phones and tablets, has made it easier and cheaper for anyone to stream video at any time from anywhere. Timing is everything.
Building out a datacenter is a lot of work. Ordering equipment takes a long time. Installing and getting all the equipment working takes a long time. And as soon they got everything working they would run out of capacity, and the whole process had to start over again.
The long lead times for equipment forced Netflix to adopt what is known as a vertical scaling strategy. Netflix made big programs that ran on big computers. This approach is called building a monolith. One program did everything.
What Netflix was good at was delivering video to their members. Netflix would rather concentrate on getting better at delivering video rather than getting better at building datacenters. Building datacenters was not a competitive advantage for Netflix, delivering video is.
It took more than eight years for Netflix to complete the process of moving from their own datacenters to AWS. During that period Netflix grew its number of streaming customers eightfold. Netflix now runs on several hundred thousand EC2 instances.
The advantage of having three regions is that any one region can fail, and the other regions will step in handle all the members in the failed region. When a region fails, Netflix calls this evacuating a region.
The header image is meant to intrigue you, to draw you into selecting a video. The idea is the more compelling the header image, the more likely you are to watch a video. And the more videos you watch, the less likely you are to unsubscribe from Netflix.
The first thing Netflix does is spend a lot of time validating the video. It looks for digital artifacts, color changes, or missing frames that may have been caused by previous transcoding attempts or data transmission problems.
A pipeline is simply a series of steps data is put through to make it ready for use, much like an assembly line in a factory. More than 70 different pieces of software have a hand in creating every video.
The idea behind a CDN is simple: put video as close as possible to users by spreading computers throughout the world. When a user wants to watch a video, find the nearest computer with the video on it and stream to the device from there.
In 2007, when Netflix debuted its new streaming service, it had 36 million members in 50 countries, watching more than a billion hours of video each month, streaming multiple terabits of content per second.
At the same time, Netflix was also devoting a lot of effort into all the AWS services we talked about earlier. Netflix calls the services in AWS its control plane. Control plane is a telecommunications term identifying the part of the system that controls everything else. In your body, your brain is the control plane; it controls everything else.
In 2011, Netflix realized at its scale it needed a dedicated CDN solution to maximize network efficiency. Video distribution is a core competency for Netflix and could be a huge competitive advantage.
The number of OCAs on a site depends on how reliable Netflix wants the site to be, the amount of Netflix traffic (bandwidth) that is delivered from that site, and the percentage of traffic a site allows to be streamed.
Within a location, a popular video like House of Cards is copied to many different OCAs. The more popular a video, the more servers it will be copied to. Why? If there was only one copy of a very popular video, streaming the video to members would overwhelm the server. As they say, many hands make light work.
Right now, up to 100% of Netflix content is being served from within ISP networks. This reduces costs by relieving internet congestion for ISPs. At the same time, Netflix members experience a high-quality viewing experience. And network performance improves for everyone.
What may not be immediately obvious is that the OCAs are independent of each other. OCAs act as self-sufficient video-serving archipelagos. Members streaming from one OCA are not affected when other OCAs fail.
Netflix does not load on one of my smart Samsung sets via channel 838. I have to use the app on the TV to get Netflix to load. Is there some kind of conflict between my smart TV and FIOS? Some time ago, I was able to use either the FIOS widget Or the TV app but now only the smart TV app seems to work on one of my sets.
No there is no conflict. It could be the box or the wiring. Try swapping that box to a location where it does work as see if it works there. If not it's the box. If it does work at the good location then it's possible that the wiring is bad.
I have the same issue, it started when I upgraded my box to Fios TV One. I spent an hour on the phone with customer support, they resest everything, blah, blah, blah. It didn't fix it. They said they had to work on it offline. I got a text message today saying it was fixed. I tried it and Netflix still won't work. Total **bleep**.
So interesting. I had the same issue and even had a technician out here today. He was able to make it work on his portable screen so he said it's a Samsung issue and not FiOS. Now they want to charge me 99 bucks to have him here. This is total bull**bleep**. He even said that no one ever had this issue and low and behold I find this forum thread. It's interesting that everything works including on demand except Netflix.
Muddling around in the support settings I hit "reboot device". That seemed to work. However, this issue has happened on 3 of my six boxes ever since I upgraded to FiosOne. I have unplugged a box in the past to fix issue and it seems to be reoccurring. I'm hoping for a more permanent fix. I'll see what happens. Thanks for advice
I have a Samsung television and a Vizio and I am having the same problem with both. So I don't think the Tech was right in saying it was a Samsung problem. I think this is a Verizon problem, one they need to test on their end in order for Netflix to work properly on their equipment.
For some, ditching the office and going fully-remote has enabled them to make significant savings on office rent. While others stand firm in the belief that going back to the office is the best option. And, of course, many companies have opted for a more hybrid approach.
The office-first strategy finally came into effect in March 2022. Just five weeks after a failed attempt to bring workers back into its New York headquarters, Solomon demanded that all workers must return to the office five days a week.
In April 2021, Jeff Bezos said that its employees would return to the office full-time in the autumn. However, Amazon is yet another business giant to make a U-turn. It initially decided to opt for a hybrid scheme that allowed employees to work from home two days per week.
The initial reopening date was set for September 7th 2021, but this was soon extended to January 2022. However, in October 2021, Amazon ditched this plan altogether and announced that it was no longer a requirement for corporate workers to return to offices.
As for the official date for the three-day return; this was originally scheduled for September 2021, but was subsequently pushed back by a month. As the objections continued, Apple once again delayed its plans to return to the office to early 2022.
After a wave of further complaints, postponements and strategy shifts, Apple landed on something slightly looser than previous proposals. Cook has ordered workers to come into offices on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with the third day decided by individual teams.
Canva said this decision was put in place after internal research, including a survey showing 81% of its teams saying they wanted to continue balancing working from the HQ with remote work even when all restrictions are eased in Australia.
CEO Jane Fraser wrote that most roles in the bank would become hybrid. In February 2022, the banking giant called for all vaccinated employees in the United States to head back into offices towards the end of March for at least two days per week.
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