In moving its streaming product to the cloud, Netflix has been able to realize tremendous benefits in scalability, performance, and availability. The biggest benefit came from moving to a service-based architecture, which allowed engineering teams to accelerate their development cycle and innovate more quickly. However, cloud migration was a substantial effort. We mobilized resources across the company over several years, reorganized our engineering and operations teams, developed new security policies, migrated to the DevOps operations model, and even embraced a new product architecture. In this talk, we trace the evolution of the Netflix cloud model, both the successes and the challenges, and present them in a way that’s maximally useful to enterprises considering making the move to the cloud.

1. What an Enterprise Can Learn from Netflix,
a Cloud Native Company
Yury Izrailevsky, VP Cloud and Platform Engineering, Netflix
November 14, 2013
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified, or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

2. August 2008 Database Corruption
RDBMS

3. Scalability
Performance
Availability

4. Netflix Streaming Growth
•
•
•
•
5 billion quarterly streaming hours
40 million customers
41 countries
3 continents
100x growth since 2009

5. Netflix Cross-regional Cloud Architecture

7. Scalability
Performance
Availability

8. Cloud Too Expensive?
87% cost reduction
per streaming start
Netflix data center

9. Cloud Efficiency Benefits
Streaming growth
1/4/2009
1/4/2010
1/4/2011
1/4/2012
1/4/2013
Cyclical daily streaming usage
Economy of scale
Elasticity

10. Scalability
Performance
Availability

11. A Truly Great Service… Has to Just Work!
Availability goal: 99.99%
30 secs/week
at peak traffic

12. 10/13/2013
9/22/2013
9/1/2013
8/11/2013
7/21/2013
6/30/2013
6/9/2013
5/19/2013
4/28/2013
4/7/2013
3/17/2013
2/24/2013
2/3/2013
1/13/2013
12/23/2012
12/2/2012
11/11/2012
10/21/2012
9/30/2012
9/9/2012
8/19/2012
7/29/2012
7/8/2012
6/17/2012
5/27/2012
5/6/2012
4/15/2012
3/25/2012
3/4/2012
2/12/2012
1/22/2012
1/1/2012
12/11/2011
11/20/2011
10/30/2011
10/9/2011
9/18/2011
8/28/2011
8/7/2011
7/17/2011
Weekly Streaming Availability (13wkMA)
12/24/2012 Elastic
Load Balancing outage
Using AWS redundancy to build highly fault-tolerant architecture

13. Netflix Cloud Journey: Tough Decisions
•
•
•
•
System rearchitecture
New security model
New operational model
Organizational changes

14. Old Architecture: Consolidated Java App
…
…
Javaweb
Javaweb
Javaweb

15. Cloud Native Service-based Architecture
15

16. Cascading Failures
API
Instant
Queue
Simple DB
16

17. Cascading Failures
…
X
99% availability
99%
99% availability
500
99% availability
= 0.657%
17

18. Cloud Native: Strategies to Improve Availability
Graceful
degradation
Redundancy

19. Cloud Native: Graceful Degradation

20. Cloud Native: Redundancy
Zone
A
Zone
B
Zone
C
Redundancy across
Availability Zones

21. Cloud Native Persistence
RDBMS
Relational NoSQL
distributed databases

22. Testing Fault Tolerance: Simian Army
Chaos Monkey
Latency Monkey
Chaos Gorilla

23. Open Source Portal at http://netflix.github.com

24. Cloud Native Operations: DevOps
Netflix data center
Central NOC team
coordinates biweekly releases
Dev teams push production
changes on own schedule;
no central coordination

25. AMI-Based Cloud Deployments
Old
code
Bake new AMI for
each app deployment
New
code
Red-black
deployments

26. Evolving a Cloud Native Organization
Data center
IT-Ops manages
budget, capacity
Self-service provisioning by dev
teams; visibility through tools
Coordinated releases
via centralized NOC
Distributed DevOps; SREs build
tools, share best practices
Oracle DBAs manage
several databases
Java, DevOps engineers support
dozens of Cassandra clusters
Data science: analysts
write SQL queries
Hadoop engineers build ETL
using PIG/Python

27. Cloud Pilot Project: Jobs Page

28. Building a Great Streaming Product
28

29. Please give us your feedback on this
presentation
ENT203
As a thank you, we will select prize
winners daily for completed surveys!