hallfall ambrois miyuki
Azucena Jewels
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 is a streaming service (previously a rental company) based in California. It allows people to stream movies and TV shows, and has been available on multiple different Nintendo consoles. Before Netflix was a streaming service, people could rent DVDs and Blu-ray movies. In January of 2010, Nintendo announced that they were partnering with Netflix so that Wii owners could stream movies on their console to watch on their television by ordering a disc from Netflix. In October of 2010, it was announced that Wii owners could download the Netflix Channel for free using the Wii Shop Channel without using discs. The new channel included a new UI, along with a search feature, replacing the Instant Queue in the older disc version. In order to watch movies and TV shows, users must already have a paid subscription to Netflix. The channel was released in the United States and Canada on October 18, 2010, and service was expanded to include the United Kingdom and Ireland on January 9, 2012.
In November 2018, Netflix announced that it would no longer be supported on the Wii effective January 30, 2019, which is the closure date of the Wii Shop Channel. A new version of the Netflix app is in development for the Nintendo Switch.
Have you ever tried Netflix streaming? My family has been using it for a couple of years, and we've really enjoyed it, and surprisingly have found it has saved us from a bunch of DVD clutter as an unexpected side benefit.
I didn't realize this until recently, but all of the Just for Kids programs have been selected with help from Common Sense Media, and provide ratings, reviews and information so we parents can make choices which are appropriate for our kids.
If you're not familiar with the service when you log in (we stream Netflix through our Wii) you get a choice between regular Netflix (what hubby and I view on date nights, for example) or Netflix Just For Kids (what all three of our kids are required to choose when they ask to "watch Netflix").
All of my kids really enjoy watching programs on Netflix, and I actually prefer they use it to watch shows rather than Comcast's On Demand, which we also have (it automatically comes with our cable subscription), since I often find the commercials for the On Demand section inappropriate for young children.
Plus, recently they've actually added several new shows and series that my five year old loves, including Tinker Bell & The Great Fairy Resuce, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse: Road Rally, and Jake & The Neverland Pirates (that's what she was watching in this picture to the left). She loves her Disney programs!
Often my youngest will watch a show with her siblings, but we also enjoy watching shows together as a family. My husband loves comic books, and has passed this love on to our kids, so we often watch superhero shows together on Netflix, including ones from channels we don't get on cable so we get excited as they get added and sometimes have a weekend night marathon when sports are not going strong.
However, I appreciate the fact that you can watch it from multiple places in your home as well. Often my husband streams a movie on his computer to watch while working on paperwork, or while exercising.
When my oldest was little we bought lots of videos (VHS, can you believe it?) and DVDs for her to watch, and trust me, we watched them A LOT! You know how really small kids like to watch the same thing over and over and over again.
The thing is, when a child outgrows those children's DVDs and videos they just become clutter. Yes, we try to show them to the next child, but if you've got multiple children you know each child's taste in shows is different and often what was a hit with one is a dud with the next.
The result -- lots of these videos and DVDs haven't been used in quite a while, and I really should just get rid of a lot of them! (In fact, that's exactly what I'm going to do in when we organized CDs and DVDs as part of the 52 Week Organized Home Challenge.)
90f70e40cf