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Why Netflix Is One of the Most Important Cloud Computing Companies
Brandon Butler writes "Netflix, yes the video rental company Netflix, is changing the cloud game. During the past two years the company has pulled back the curtains through its Netflix OSS program to provide a behind-the-scenes look into how it runs one of the largest deployments of Amazon Web Services cloud-based resources. In doing so, the company is creating tools that can be used by both entire business-size scale cloud deployments and even smaller test environments. The Simian Army, for example randomly kills off VMs or entire availability zones in Amazon's cloud to test fault tolerance, Asgard is a cloud resource dashboard and Lipstick on (Apache) Pig, is a data visualization tool for the Hadoop program; there are dozens of others that help deploy, manage and monitor the tens of thousands of VM instances the company company can be running at any single time. Netflix is also creating a cadre of developers who are experts in managing cloud deployments, and already its former employees are popping up at other companies to bring their expertise on how to run a large-scale cloud resources. Meanwhile, Netflix does this all in AWS's cloud, which raises some questions of how good of a job it's actually doing when it can be massively impacted by cloud outages, such as the one on Christmas Eve last year that brought down Netflix's services but, interestingly, not Amazon's own video streaming system, which is a competitor to the company."
While I watch Netflix, I sometimes think about all of the magic that must be going on behind the scenes to deal with varying delivery speed
In almost all cases, my video entertainment proceeds, uninterrupted
As a guy who has worked with video streaming at the lowest level, I have nothing but respect for their tech
It frustrates me that a company that relies so heavily on open source technologies on the server totally snubs users of those same open source technologies on the Desktop.
So you would have rather had no Netflix support in Android or ChromeOS? Because there would be no support at all without DRM. Such is the nature of the beast.
Yes. When you sign up for Netflix, you agree to their terms of service, that you will not copy their shit.
Instead of just suing people who break their terms of service (which is completely reasonable. If you don't want to abide by the terms, don't use the service), they cram unworkable DRM into open standards. Now we wind up with code running on our own devices that 1) we don't know what it's doing and 2) breaking it open to see what it's doing is a crime.
The NSA spying/backdoor bullshit should make it abundantly clear that non-libre software is a threat to human rights, and should be rejected, whether it's for movie streaming, "secure boot," cloud storage, or anything else. Fuck netflix right in their stupid faces.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
You're not obligated to use it. If you don't want to use DRM, then don't. But if other people want to, that's their choice. That's what freedom is about. Don't try to shove your opinions down other peoples' throats. Just make your own choice, and let other people make their own choice.
I like how you say the movies are shitty, as if you know what the poster (and other Netflix users) watch. Saying they're shitty is somehow supposed to enhance your position - to suggest that they're not worth it anyway to offset the DRM aspect.
Let's face it, hardware locked "trusted computing" phones and other hardware are the norm and getting worse no matter WHAT we do. We don't have the influence to tell every other person out there to not buy them - telling people to not enjoy life and modern technology over some ideological issues that really aren't that bad in the first place isn't going to work. Heck, as I get older I find myself less and less caring as well as more important things take priority in my life.
We can't stop locked hardware trends because the companies are too powerful. Fight battles that can be won.
Why shouldn't it be? Because you think it's yucky? Standards document what multiple vendors do, to help them do it the same way. That's all - they do not endorse, or make moral judgments.
Basically, successful standards usually take what vendors have working just fine without a standard and standardize it. Just making things up because they sound good and trying to impose them leads to fiascos like the previous HTML "standards", where half the endpoints didn't remotely comply.
Avoiding things that Xtifr finds yucky is unproven at best as a method for making a successful standard.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
DRM and other copy protection should be ripped out and burned at the stake along with the fuckers that force it on us. I made a vhs video of family several years ago and when trying to convert it to digital format got into a battle with fucked-up protection shit blocking because I didn't have rights to the video.. WTH ?? This was my video shot on my machine! So much for purchased vido editing software! Found opensource to get the job done. Wish I could bill the bastards that own the lame protection for time wasted.
Care to enlighten us what software did this?