Netflix on AWS
Netflix is one of the world’s leading entertainment services with over 260 million members in more than 190 countries. Netflix uses AWS for nearly all its computing and storage needs, including databases, analytics, recommendation engines, video transcoding, and more—hundreds of functions that in total use more than 100,000 server instances on AWS.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Netflix entertains the world, providing a wide variety of TV series, films and games to hundreds of millions of members across the globe in over 30 languages. Netflix builds diversity, inclusion, equity, and a global outlook into everything it does, and by fostering a culture of courage, empathy, and curiosity, Netflix can move faster to develop new stories and better ways of sharing them with its members around the world. Netflix relies on AWS to help it innovate with speed and consistently deliver best-in-class entertainment. AWS provides Netflix with compute, storage, and infrastructure that allow the company to scale quickly, operate securely, and meet capacity needs anywhere in the world. Moreover, Netflix, a leading content producer, has used AWS to build a studio in the cloud. This virtual studio enables Netflix to engage top artistic talent, no matter the location, and Netflix artists and partners have the freedom to collaborate without technological or geographical barriers.
CUSTOMER STORIES
Powering creativity and collaboration with Netflix on the AWS Fix This Podcast
2022
Discover how Netflix uses AWS to build flexible, remote workstations to attract and retain creative talent that can now collaborate from virtually anywhere.
Netflix Empowers Remote Artistry with Low-Latency Workstations Using AWS Local Zones
2022
Netflix is dedicated to facilitating collaboration among artists and content creators around the globe through remote workstations and offering a seamless content-creation experience closer to artists. Learn how Netflix achieved this goal by deploying its visual effects studio closer to artists using AWS Local Zones, helping it achieve single-digit millisecond latency and keep its remote workstations running smoothly.
Global Production ft. Netflix
2021
In this keynote presentation at SIGGRAPH 2021, Laura Teclamariam, director of product and animation at Netflix, and Rahul Dani, director of studio engineering at Netflix, discuss how content production today is truly global and what that means for storytellers.
The Courage of Innovation: A Conversation with Vernā Myers, Vice President of Inclusion Strategy at Netflix
2021
Netflix is a company that believes in invention and reinvention. Netflix's vice president of inclusion strategy, Vernā Myers, shares some of the secrets behind Netflix's culture, addressing the importance of having the courage to break new ground, how the company approaches diversity, inclusion, and equity, and why curiosity is one of the most important traits to creating an inclusive culture.
With the new Amazon EC2 G5 instances, we can provision higher-end graphics workstations that offer up to 3x higher performance compared to workstations with EC2 G4dn instances. With G5 instances, content creators have the freedom to create more complex and realistic content for our viewers.”
Stephen Kowalski
Director of Digital Production Infrastructure Engineering, Netflix
Producing “The Crown" in The Cloud
2021
Production of the fourth season of Netflix’s episodic drama “The Crown” faced unexpected challenges, as the world went into lockdown for the COVID-19 pandemic just as post-production VFX work was slated to begin. By adopting a cloud-based workflow on AWS, Netflix’s in-house VFX team of 10 artists was able to seamlessly complete more than 600 VFX shots for the season’s 10-episode run in just 8 months, all while working remotely.
![Read "The Crown" case study](https://d1.awsstatic.com/customer-references-customer-content/netflix_crown_bts.63d672150fb4655529aec07ea31a7b3ada1a6bd4.png "Combined photo showing the "before" and "after" of VFX work on "The Crown"")
By adopting a cloud-based workflow on AWS, "The Crown” in-house VFX team was able to complete more than 600 VFX shots, working remotely, in just 8 months.
Netflix Uses NICE DCV on AWS to Build VFX Studio in the Cloud for Artists Globally
2021
Netflix expanded into content production in 2012 and is now one of the world's leading studios. With a culture of continual innovation, the company wanted to build a visual effects (VFX) studio in the cloud to attract top VFX and animation artists worldwide and enable seamless collaboration between global teams. Using NICE DCV and Amazon EC2 G4 Instances, Netflix built remote workstations without having to choose between responsiveness and image quality. Learn how Netflix went from beta to launch in just 1 year, reducing technological and geographical barriers for artists while optimizing costs.
How Netflix Thinks About Cybersecurity
2020
AWS chief information security officer Steve Schmidt sits down with Jason Chan, vice president of information security at Netflix, to talk about security strategy, building a security program, Zero Trust, and cats as a unique threat model.
Like other home-entertainment services, Netflix has seen temporarily higher viewing and increased member growth during this unprecedented time. In order to meet this demand our control plane services needed to scale very quickly. This is where the value of AWS and our strong partnership became apparent, both in being able to meet capacity needs in compute, storage, as well as providing the necessary infrastructure, such as AWS Auto Scaling, which is deeply ingrained in Netflix’s operations model.”
Nils Pommerien
Director, Cloud Infrastructure Engineering, Netflix
Netflix Connects with 100 Million Customers in 190 Countries Using Amazon Simple Email Service
2020
Before migrating to Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), Netflix maintained an in-house solution for sending email. This solution carried its own operational overhead, including running dedicated servers with email-delivery software and optimizing email-send practices for each Internet Service Provider. Netflix needed an email solution that was flexible, affordable, highly scalable, and that had global reach. Learn how Netflix uses Amazon SES to overcome these challenges and the benefits the company realized by using the service.
Before we migrated to Amazon Simple Email Service, Netflix had to maintain an in-house solution for sending emails. This in-house solution carried its own operational overheads, including running dedicated servers with email delivery software and optimizing email sending practices for each Internet Service Provider. We evaluated several email delivery solutions and decided on Amazon SES because it is flexible, affordable, highly scalable, has global reach, and promises excellent deliverability.”
Devika Chawla
Director, Messaging & Contact Engineering, Netflix
ARCHITECTURE
Netflix Realizes Multi-Region Resiliency on Amazon Route 53
What happens when you need to move 89 million viewers to a different AWS region? Netflix's infrastructure, built on AWS, makes it possible to be extremely resilient, even when the company is running services in many AWS Regions simultaneously. In this episode of This is My Architecture, Coburn Watson, director of performance and reliability engineering at Netflix, walks through the company's DNS architecture—built on Amazon Route 53 and augmented with Netflix's Zuul—that allows the team to evacuate an entire region in less than 40 minutes.
Find out how AWS for M&E transforms media workloads with the most purpose-built capabilities of any cloud.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
FROM OUTSIDE AWS
How Netflix Used NICE DCV from AWS to Enable a Distributed Creative Workforce
How Netflix Engineering Supports Content Creation
The Netflix Tech Blog: Unbundling Data Science Workflows with Metaflow and AWS Step Functions
The Netflix Tech Blog: ConsoleMe: A Central Control Plane for AWS Permissions and Access