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Yamila Comejo
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.
It's only taken 27 years, but I might finally be ready to get into the Pokemon series. I've dabbled in the Nintendo franchise before but have struggled to get into it as much as it seems like everyone else has. If there's anything to break through to me after all this time though, it's got to be the upcoming Netflix series Pokemon Concierge.
In February, The Pokemon Company hosted a Pokemon Presents where it announced new DLC for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, details about Pokemon Sleep, and more. The main attraction for me though was the teaser trailer for a new Pokemon stop motion animated series. The premise of the show sees Haru, a concierge at the 'Pokemon Resort', welcome a number of familiar guests into the retreat (including Psyduck - who is the only Pokemon to make an appearance in the teaser trailer) but that's all we know about it right now - we haven't even got a release date yet.
My introduction to Pokemon could have been around the early 2000s when I was about three or four years old. I was too young to understand the games or to see the trading card game as anything more than a deck of sparkly pieces of paper, so naturally, my way into Pokemon was through the early seasons of the anime. I remember being a fan of Jigglypuff, Togepi, and of course Pikachu, but I can't say I really knew anything about how Pokemon actually worked or the bigger story behind these cute creatures on my screen.
Nowadays, I'm not a huge fan of RPGs so don't find a lot of enjoyment out of the Pokemon games, however shocking it might be to hear a 90s baby say that. That doesn't mean that I don't love a good life-sized Pokemon plush or just the little critters in general. In fact, I wish there were more ways for me to enjoy The Pokemon Company's creations outside of the games and long-running anime series, which is where I'm hoping Pokemon Concierge comes in.
Upon seeing the teaser trailer, I was instantly reminded of Netflix's other stop-motion animation series Rilakkuma and Kaoru, and its follow-up series Rilakkuma's Theme Park Adventure, and for good reason. As revealed during the Pokemon Presents stream, the studio behind Rilakkuma and his various adventures, Dwarf Studios, will be working with Netflix once again for Pokemon Concierge. So I'm basically guaranteed to like it.
Both of the Rilakkuma shows follow office worker Kaoru and her bear-y cute roommates and human-sized teddy bears Rilakkuma, Korilakkuma, and her pet bird Kiiroitori. As you'd expect from Dwarf Studios, the series is a very sweet stop-motion animation production where the episodes are all under 20 minutes long and literally just show the group as they get into a range of harmless shenanigans. This is exactly what I'm hoping we're going to get from Pokemon Concierge, which if accurate, might just be enough to make me a fan of the wider Pokemon universe.
I can totally see main character Haru having to juggle the goings on at the resort and dealing with all the Pokemon that try to disturb it. If it's anything like Rilakkuma's show, I'm imagining things like Lapras taking up too much space in the pool, Snorlax sleeping across several sunbeds, Exeggutor shading guests around the resort, Fidough sleeping on the buffet table, and anything else you can think of from the 1,000+ Pokemon that have been designed.
Since information about Pokemon Concierge is so scarce right now, there's no way of telling what kind of show we're in for. I do have another idea as to who we could see in the upcoming anime though. As revealed by Netflix, Pokemon won't be the only guests to visit Haru and the Pokemon Resort. The various 'mons will also be accompanied by "their owners" which would open the door to not only new original trainers to be introduced to the Pokemon series but also some returning ones too.
Although nothing's guaranteed, it would be so exciting to see a stop-motion puppet version of Ash with his Pikachu visiting the resort, especially now that their time as the lead characters of the Pokemon anime is coming to an end. It doesn't even need to be limited to just Ash either, it would also be fun to see the likes of Brock, Misty, Professor Oak, Nurse Joy, or maybe even the new Pokemon anime protagonists checking into the spa - knowing how long it takes to create stop motion films though, it's probably less likely that we'll see such new characters in Pokemon Concierge.
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