attetan giacinta margolis
Juan Navarro
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.
Pretty sure my device is just dying. I have Roku express streaming player which is only about 18 months old and is suddenly not connecting due to poor wifi signal. It's been trouble free up to now and suddenly started to misbehave, it worked perfectly one day, then would not connect the next. (Nothing changed elsewhere)
My suspected dodgy Roku Express indicated a signal strength of around 15 (I assume out of 100) Simply switching boxes to my Roku Premier, and touching nothing else, I get an indicated 34. So more than double.
Good luck. I've been quite pleased with my Streaming Stick+. Me only complaint is a couple of times a month I lose wifi connection and have to jump through a hoop or two to get it reestablished, but I've gotten pretty good at it.
I'll leave it a couple of weeks and then try it again, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it sorted itself out like the last issue eventually did. Gut feeling is it's a software update issue, possibly at Netflix's end, but who knows, the customer support/feed back is nigh on none existent.
Wile trying to bottom the issue I've used the "Secret screen" menu and also noticed these things run hot! My device is used in a cool bedroom at around 18deg C. The Roku hits 88-90degs and that is not streaming 4K. I'm pretty sure the processor is already beginning to throttle as you can see the clock freq stepping up and down. I would imagine the lifespan of these devices will be pretty short running as hot as they do. Rubbish design on the heat management side.
From time to time, I have confessed my love for the Vudu set-top box that instantly streams up to 720p quality HD movies (or 1080p quality non-instant) over the Internet to your TV. The Vudu player is not subscription-based, so in addition to ponying up for the hardware, you have to pay an average of 3-5 each time you want to rent SD or HD quality movies. After a while of spending over 50 a month with the Vudu box, I decided check out the instant streaming landscape and take a look at the popular subscription-based Roku player. While the Roku player is often called the Netflix player, that is starting to change as it supports more services, most recently with the addition of Amazon Video on Demand.
Notice: During my review of the Roku player I was using an 80Mbps down Internet connection. Obviously this plays a huge role in the performance of a bandwidth-dependent streaming device. Your mileage may vary.
Ergonomically-speaking the Roku remote gets the job done and is the perfect size for natural placement of your thumb in the middle of the control. While I slightly miss the scroll wheel of the Vudu player's remote, the large Roku remote buttons provide ample tactile feedback with a soft yet noticable clicking feel. Only 9 buttons inhabit the Roku remote and all are self-explanatory.
The next step is linking your Netflix account to the Roku player. I was supplied with a confirmation code to link to my Netflix account. That required logging into Netflix on my computer, but was all of a 15 second affair. A similar procedure is also required for linking the Roku player to Amazon for Video on Demand support. Regardless of these requirements, setup took just a few minutes.
After doing a bit of research, Roku's decision to not allow Netflix browsing on the player was almost intentional. They wanted to keep everything about the Roku simple, and leave the complex bits to the Netflix website, which it's very capable of handling already.
Roku's implementation of Amazon Video on Demand is a bit different. You have some limited browsing ability but not searching. Filtering options include sorting by new releases, genre, popularity and alphabetically, but if you're looking to find something that isn't really popular you will have to do lots of annoying side-scrolling.
Fast-forwarding and rewinding through both Amazon and Netflix movies and TV shows can be burdensome due to the streaming nature of the Roku player. Whereas the Vudu player would buffer the entire movie on its hard drive, making rewinding and fast-forwarding quick and seamless, the same cannot be said about the Roku player. To get around this issue, Roku engineers implemented a visual timeline of sorts. After selecting the frame you want to jump to, there is a 5-10 second loading delay, obviously dependent upon your connection. It's an innovative solution, I'll give them that.
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