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Prometeo Archuleta
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.
You may have noticed that it's possible to speed up Netflix playback, similar to how you can on services like YouTube. However, if you're thinking about fast-forwarding through your Netflix binge, here's why you should think twice.
This happens with a pitch adjustment, so it doesn't sound like everyone's breathing helium, but everything moves more quickly. As I write this, the fastest speed Netflix allows is 1.5 times normal, which should save you 20 minutes out of every hour.
That's a lot of time saved if you're on YouTube and trying to learn something efficiently. However, if you're trying to enjoy a show or a movie, and aren't on a publication deadline to write a recap for some blog somewhere, it's not the best idea. If you're the pragmatic sort, you might be wondering what the actual problem is here, and I'm glad you asked!
Actually, in some ways, playing your shows and movies back at higher speeds makes it look like motion smoothing is on. Even worse, the movement of characters and the physics of objects all look wrong. It's cheesy and a little disconcerting. So, for the same reasons you shouldn't watch a movie with smooth motion switched on, you shouldn't watch it at a faster speed than intended.
Modern streaming is a massive convenience, but it's also the source of anxiety for some of us. There are simply too many shows and movies coming out, and it's understandable that you want to be part of that pop culture conversation. People also have a tendency to watch (or even listen) to services like Netflix while doing other things, based on the myth that the human brain can multitask.
There's a chance that when you read the title of this piece, you thought to yourself "you can speed up Netflix?" So for completeness' sake, if you have a good reason to want faster playback, or perhaps more likely slightly slower playback, here's how to do it.
First, this only works on the Netflix web player, and iOS and Android apps. So if you want to do this on your Apple TV, Android box, or using a Smart TV app, I'm afraid you're out of luck. One potential workaround is to use your smart TV's web browser, which might work depending on how advanced it is. Before you say it, I also thought it might work while casting from my phone, but the function doesn't seem to work that way. At least it didn't for me.
With that out of the way, all you have to do while something is playing is pause the video. You'll see a set of controls at the bottom of the screen. Select this icon that looks like a speedometer. Also, it says "speed" on it too, which is another strong clue.
You know what? I take back what I said about never watching a movie at 1.5x. If you want to watch The Irishman in two hours and twenty minutes instead of three-and-a-half hours, be my guest. That's the one time it makes complete sense.
I was really hoping that the documentary would dig into all the off the field and behind the scenes stuff that was going on in the program over that time period. Instead, they mostly glossed over it and even went as far as to paint the picture that the team had huge discipline issues before Urban arrived, and Urban cleaned it up.
Not necessarily surprising since the person most interviewed in the doc was Urban himself. Followed second by Tim Tebow. The documentary was about the on the field and in the weight room side of the team. Not the off the field illegal activities (41 arrests on the team, Aaron Hernandez murdering people), partying, bar fights, all the players having law enforcement and lawyers they could call to get out of trouble, etc. that Urban allowed to go on while head coach at Florida.
It was about how Urban instilled discipline into the team. How he changed the culture by not letting the team go out and party on Friday and Saturday nights because he would schedule grueling team workouts at midnight. How losing wasn't acceptable but things had to be done the right way. How the team was a disciplined family, committed to excellence on and off the field.
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