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Arleen Jerdee
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.
Everything worked well for months. Suddenly, when we put Netflix on, no sound. There IS sound for a Netflix trailer, but not for an actual show. All other apps (Disney +, CW, Amazon Prime) are working fine. In another room, with another Roku, Netflix is working fine. What happened, and what needs to be done?
My son was able to fix it. I believe he went into Roku settings and then audio. And change the setting to stereo. Rather than the other one that was selected. And the hdmi setting was at auto. Restarted netflix and it was back to normal. Not sure why it started (never changed the setting to begin with) but it's worked fine since. Hope this helps!
Can you please provide more information about the issue you are experiencing? Is the issue you are experiencing only happen on the Netflix channel or does the loss of audio happen on all channels? What troubleshooting steps have you taken so far to try to resolve the issue? How long has the issue been occurring?
As a first step, could you try to remove any channel you observe this issue on from the Roku home screen? Then, restart your device. Once it loads up again, add the channel back once more and try playing content again.
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Even as media companies like Disney and tech giants like Apple push into streaming video, Netflix remains the No. 1 service in the world, and one of the most-sought after tech companies to work for. Its employees are also some of the happiest out there.
Those aren't just platitudes to Netflix recruiters. These qualities are deeply ingrained into Netflix's culture, which is detailed in a more than 4,000-word culture memo on the streaming company's website. The document made waves when it was first released a decade ago because of elements of its management philosophy like its high-performance culture, lack of a formal vacation policy, and aversion to "brilliant jerks."
Some of those elements remain in the culture memo today. The company's 10 core values are: judgment, communication, curiosity, courage, passion, selflessness, innovation, inclusion, integrity, and impact.
In the interview stage, for example, you'll likely be expected to give candid feedback, which ties into Netflix's communications and integrity values. The company hires on culture as much as it hires for skill.
One recent candidate was asked during an interview about how she might change specific features in Netflix's US product, Toda said. The candidate was from Mexico and suggested that Netflix should also ask about features from versions of its products outside of the US, since the company was trying to grow globally.
While you're reading up on Netflix's culture, honestly reflect on whether it's right for you. With values like "communication" and "passion" also come candid feedback, and the expectation that workers should perform at the top of their fields. The Wall Street Journal in 2018 reported that Netflix's culture has also resulted in blunt and frequent firings.
"You don't do yourself a favor if you trick the interview system to get in," one former employee told Business Insider. "It's a really challenging place to work ... They don't just put it [culture deck] away when you get hired. It comes up all the time, in every meeting."
Netflix has a "WeAreNetflix" account on LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social networks where it documents what its like to work at the streaming company. It also has a podcast where its execs and recruiters discuss what individual teams, like legal, are doing.
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