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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.
All so people can watch some of the worst entertainment in human history.
You know what? There's actually a bloody gigantic amount of excellent content on NetFlix. Admittedly their ultra-pathetic interface makes it damned near impossible to find, but it is there.
Now, there are reasons to dislike DRM, and in fact the stupid regional DRM licences are one of the reasons why people pay extra to access US NetFlix instead of their local one*, And surely there are still times each month when I'll grab something from Pirate Bay because NetFlix doesn't have it.
But, and this is the big fat critical but, at the end of the day NetFlix works, works well, and delivers a hell of a lot of good programming for very, very little money. And does so in way that the DRM is simply not noticeable.
It may be preferable for NetFlix to have no DRM, but as it stands now I can't think of any practical difference it would make to my experience as a user.
Until the anti-DRM crowd creates a fully Open Source media service, licences tens of thousands of TV shows and movies, and serves it up DRM free, NetFlix is the best that we've got.
*If you're stuck with NetFlix Canada, well accept that you've got one quarter of the choices, and half of those feature Paul Gross.
Three Squirrels
The Media Source API that Netflix is helping to push also provides a lot of really useful features for non-drm video in the web browser as well. Providing a simple way to download chunks of video and seamlessly insert them into a container through javascript will prove really useful for javascript web applications. Even some of the encrypted stuff will be great for things like sharing personal videos with only a few friends.
As a web developer interested in new ways to provide video, the Media Source stuff would immediately be really useful to me, and I'm sure many other people who won't even touch the DRM part. Don't let one company sour the whole proposal.
I've been a user of both services since they became available. Along with Amazon Unbox now becoming Amazon Instant Video and the even newer Amazon Instant Video with Prime, I humbly suggest that we consider that a large part of the Amazon Prime streaming library may actually be served to us by a white-label Netflix service.
Consider this: both Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video offer many of the same programming options with a few selections unavailable on one service or the other. Plus, there are many obscure series collections that appear on both services and at the same perceived video quality (at least, to my eyes).
The bulk of the live streaming library has to be shared, in my opinion, with Netflix. Business-wise, it makes sense. Logically, it makes even more sense.
Kriston
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.
Netflix does run their own CDN (based on FreeBSD) for the movies, which are the vast majority of their bandwidth. The Amazon stuff is for the web UI and background processing workloads (e.g. working out popular films related viewing patterns and so). This stuff is pretty busty, especially as more and more people use custom NetFlix apps and so don't hit the web UI at all.
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