How AWS helped Netflix to become world’s leading streaming platform !?
Founded on 29th August, 1997 by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings, Netflix initially started with the business model which included DVD sales and rental by mail. Netflix introduced the monthly subscription concept in September 1999, and then dropped the single-rental model in early 2000. Since that time, the company has built its reputation on the business model of flat-fee unlimited rentals without due dates, late fees, shipping and handling fees, or per-title rental fees.
Netflix’s video on demand streaming service, formerly branded as Watch Now, allows 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 has an extensive library of feature films, documentaries, TV shows, anime, award-winning Netflix originals, and more. Watch as much as you want, anytime you want.
Let’s see some facts !!
Started with just 300,000 subscribers in 2000, Netflix has had a rapid growth in the number of subscribers. In 2011, the numbers were 21.6 million and has been growing since then. By the end of 2016, Netflix stated a record 86 M members out of which 71M paid subscribers and moving on to the most crucial year, 2020 which had us in trouble, seems to be another milestone for the number 1 streaming platform, with 204M members by the end of the year. Also, Netflix stated 150M hours of streaming per day in 2016 which increased to 6.1B hours of streaming per day in 2021.
One question that strikes my mind is “How they are able to do all this ?”
Netflix uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) for nearly all its computing and storage needs, including databases, analytics, recommendation engines, video transcoding, and many more hundreds of functions that in total use more than 100,000+ server instances on AWS.
User can access shows and movies seamlessly and it’s possible only because of services provided by AWS. Netflix started using cloud services and container technology in 2008 and since then they never looked back. They started migrating in 2008 to eliminate heavy lifting and by the end of 2016, Netflix successfully shifted all of its data to AWS and now they don’t have their own data centers. Isn’t it amazing !!
AWS Services used by Netflix are Amazon EC2, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Elastic Transcoder, AWS Lambda, AWS S3 and many more.
Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances for fault tolerance and load distribution. Netflix has only one file the original, raw movie file. That file is stored in an S3 object storage service, which splits and encrypts the file into separate chunks, storing the chunks in Amazon S3. This object storage service also handles content security, auditing, disaster recovery, and more.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is a part of Amazon.com’s cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services, that allows users to use virtual computers on which they can run any type of computer application. Netflix has only one file the original, raw movie file. That file is stored in an S3 object storage service, which splits and encrypts the file into separate chunks, storing the chunks in Amazon S3. This object storage service also handles content security, auditing, disaster recovery, and more.
Just like this, Netflix use many more services of AWS and hope to see much more collaboration between Netflix and AWS.
AWS, not just helps Netflix but it is used by many more technical giants such as Discovery, NFL, Fox, Comcast, BBC, Formula1, The Walt Disney Company, Epic Games, etc.
I will discuss some technologies in the further blogs, till then have a read at this.
Signing off
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