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Latarsha Dorrance
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.
Are you tired of missing out on your favorite Netflix shows and movies when traveling abroad? It can be frustrating to discover that the content you love is restricted based on your current location. The good news is that you can change your Netflix region and regain access to a wider variety of content, no matter where you are in the world.
Yes, this method will allow you to watch Netflix anywhere abroad and is popular with people who travel frequently. For example, Americans visiting the UK will be able to securely stream American Netflix, and British travelers in the US can watch Netflix UK.
Many providers are committed to providing a workaround and maintaining servers that offer reliable VPN access to various Netflix libraries. Even so, not all of these providers offer a comparable service. For streaming, you need to ensure your VPN is fast and reliable. And you also want to know that your chosen provider values security and privacy to the utmost degree.
NordVPN is another strong player in terms of privacy protection and security. It keeps no logs whatsoever, not even bandwidth data caps. Security is in the form of 256-bit banking-grade encryption with perfect forward secrecy. DNS leak protection and a customizable kill switch help ensure your data never leaves the encrypted tunnel. One more unique security feature is that certain dedicated servers are optimized to protect against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
QUICK AND CAPABLE:IPVanish makes it as easy as possible to stream your favorite Netflix shows while traveling. Boasts blazing-fast speeds, a strong security toolkit, and a 30-day money-back guarantee on annual and two-year plans.
Besides Netflix, ExpressVPN can grant you secure access to many other streaming services, including Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and HBO Max. All servers are optimized for speed, and this, coupled with a reliable service, means you can stream shows and movies seamlessly.
easy-to-use apps:CyberGhost is the beginners' favorite choice that works well with Netflix and other popular streaming services. Stores no logs and streams HD video reliably. 45-day money-back guarantee.
FAST SPEEDS:PrivateVPN works with US Netflix and many other country versions. Allows up to 6 devices on the same account. Small network of servers but fast and capable connections. 30-day money-back guarantee.
PureVPN is an excellent VPN choice for home internet users primarily preoccupied with accessing streaming services. In our recent tests, it performed flawlessly to access a wide choice of international streaming services in the US, the UK, Europe, and elsewhere. In terms of Netflix, we were able to access the large US catalog and regional catalogs in Canada, the UK, Japan, and Germany.
The VPN is fast thanks to its WireGuard implementation, providing average global download speeds of around 400 Mbps across the server we tested. This is impressive considering that PureVPN is one of the cheapest premium VPNs available.
All things considered, however, this VPN is a highly impressive all-rounder that you can compare to any other VPN risk-free using its 31-day money-back guarantee. Just bear in mind that if you want access to its port-forwarding feature you will need to pay a bit extra.
FAST AND CHEAP:PureVPN is a highly impressive VPN to stream Netflix on a budget. The VPN is reliable and easy to use on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and Firestick. Strong no logs policy and rock solid AES-256 encryption. Allows torrenting. Protects you on public WiFi. 31-day money-back guarantee.
It also comes packed with advanced features, including AES encryption, a kill switch, a choice of protocols, obfuscation, split tunneling, multi-hop connections, self-owned bare metal servers (Secure Core), and Tor over VPN. Needless to say, this makes it one of the most advanced VPNs available on the market.
Besides its robust security, ProtonVPN offers superb speeds and it works to access Netflix, BBC iPlayer, Hulu, HBO Max, and nearly every other streaming service we tested it with. This makes it a decent option for streaming. It also has torrenting-optimized servers and port forwarding, which makes it a superb all-rounder.
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