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."

Comments

Netfilx works

[MpVpRb]

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

Re:Netfilx works

[KhabaLox]

It's no small feat the transcoding automation they must have built to take the mezzanine files that they get delivered to them and create the packages of multi-bitrate, DRM-wrapped files that the consumer eventually sees. There are only a handful (maybe only 3) of companies that can do this on any type of scale.

Re:DRM Hell

[Desler]

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.

Re:DRM Hell

[rueger]

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.