marimar waringa sayres
Denisha Cerniglia
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.
Oddly enough I can call T-Mobile and the other line on my account works fine and I can text with no problem both on Wi-Fi and LTE so it seems Wi-Fi calling does nothing to help or hinder. Network settings have not changed.
Hey there! Do you happen to have the Netflix on Us active on your account? It comes with Family Allowances and can sometimes (for lack of a better term) glitch and cause an error with calls as though you have numbers blocked. The solution that I've found has been to reach out to care (either by 611, Message Us, or T-Force) and have them remove the feature, reboot your phone, add the feature back, reboot again. Everything should work fine after that! 😀
I'm on an old T-Mobile one promo plan and there was no reason for any family allowances or restrictions on either line. since everything worked yesterday and did not today and no account changes were made it stood to reason that the SIM card was the issue.
my area is serviced by a 40-person team 3 hours away where only two of them work on the chatline weekly. I have had The Misfortune three times to get the same person who knows nothing of TMobile. Unfortunately in this case you cannot just request another team member.
Luckily I was savy enough to call in to 611 to have another sim card reactivated by number. Of course it was like a goat rope and trying to get the representative to understand what I was doing and why I was requesting it. However in the long run I figured it out and eventually they did what I asked them to do.
Hmm... Did your Tech Expert file a trouble ticket? You may want to reach out to T-Force via Facebook or Twitter, I've had some pretty complicated issues before and they were able to sort everything out.
The only thing I could think of would be if you had Family Allowances on the account WITH the Netflix feature. I'd definitely have the Netflix removed and check your add-ons via the my.t-mobile.com website.
I had the exact same issue and it was because we had Netflix active on our T-mobile One Plan before and just removed it on t-mobile.com. I was able to fix it solely using the web portal after you log in t-mobile.com.
After you log into your account, click "Contact Us" on the top navigation. And under "Plans & Usage", click "Add family allowances". As the account own, you need to check "Family Allowances". As what other said, this could be a bug from t-mobile that when you remove the Netflix service from your account you also remove this "Family Allowances" feature as well. Apparently without this, you can't make calls.
Obviously there are lots of folks (including me, located in the Los Angeles area) who are furious about Verizon's unacceptably poor delivery of Netflix content. There are either numerous pauses waiting for buffering or reduced resolution due to Netflix increasing compression ratios to reduce network traffic. Neither of these are what we are paying for, and both are unacceptable.
clearly shows Verizon's steadily decreasing performance delivering Netflix content. At this rate the delivery speed will drop to zero in a few more months. Abd we are expected to continue paying for this?
How about some sort of petition sent to the FCC ( but addressed to whom or what department?) Or perhaps we flood the head of Verizon (who is that?) with emails or actual letters. Or how about letters to the editors of major newspapers and/or wire services? How about emails to all the popular PC & Internet oriented magazines & blogs?
My sense is that the only way to actually make something happen to fix this situation is to raise enough attention that Verizon management realizes it is in the company's best interest to stop stonewalling and instead actually do something.
Yeah, I'm fortinate that in my area there is an alternative to FIOS - Cox Cable, which, surprisingly enough, is near the top of the Netflix speed chart. However, switching to Cox does not do anything to address the basic problem and therefore seems like admitting defeat right out of the box.
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