Netflix on AWS
Netflix is a video on demand streaming service with over 280 million members in more than 190 countries. Using Amazon Web Services (AWS), Netflix innovates with speed and delivers best-in-class entertainment consistently. 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, as a content producer, Netflix built a virtual studio in the AWS cloud, enabling engagement with artistic talent anywhere in the world without technological or geographical barriers.
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Remote Working
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Machine Learning
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Continuous Innovation
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Business Transformation
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Security Compliance
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Outside AWS
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Remote Working
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2022
Powering Creativity and Collaboration with Netflix on the AWS Fix This Podcast
Discover how Netflix uses AWS to build flexible, remote workstations to attract and retain creative talent that can collaborate from virtually anywhere.
2022Netflix Empowers Remote Artistry with Low-Latency Workstations Using AWS Local Zones
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.
2021Producing “The Crown" in The Cloud
Producing 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 ten artists was able to seamlessly complete more than 600 VFX shots for the season’s ten-episode run in just eight months, all while working remotely.
2021Netflix Uses NICE DCV on AWS to Build VFX Studio in the Cloud for Artists Globally
With a culture of continual innovation, Netflix 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 one year, reducing technological and geographical barriers for artists while optimizing costs.
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Machine Learning
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2020
Designing Better ML Systems: Learnings from Netflix
Data science at Netflix goes far beyond eponymous recommendation systems and touches every aspect of the business, from optimizing content delivery to fighting fraud. Netflix’s unique culture affords its data scientists extraordinary freedom of choice in tools, which results in an ever-expanding set of machine learning approaches and systems. In 2019, Netflix open-sourced its human-centric ML platform, Metaflow. In this session, Netflix shares some lessons learned in its multi-year journey building the ML systems that Metaflow incorporates.
2019More Data Science with Less Engineering: ML Infrastructure at Netflix
Netflix provides its engineers and data scientists with delightfully usable ML infrastructure that they can use to manage a project's lifecycle. The end-to-end ML infrastructure, Metaflow, was designed to leverage the strengths of AWS: elastic compute; high-throughput storage; and dynamic, scalable notebooks. In this session, learn about Netflix's human-centric design principles that enable the autonomy its engineers enjoy.
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Continuous Innovation
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2021
The Courage of Innovation: A Conversation with Vernā Myers, Vice President of Inclusion Strategy at Netflix
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.
2021Global Production ft. Netflix
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.
2019A Day in the Life of a Netflix Engineer
Netflix is a large, ever-changing ecosystem serving millions of customers across the globe through cloud-based systems and a globally distributed CDN. This entertaining romp through the tech stack serves as an introduction to how Netflix designs systems and approaches operational challenges, in addition to how other organizations can apply its thought processes and technologies.
2017How Netflix Tunes Amazon EC2 Instances for Performance
Netflix uses Amazon EC2 instance types and features to create a high- performance cloud, achieving near-bare-metal speed for its workloads. This session summarizes the configuration, tuning, and activities for delivering the fastest possible Amazon EC2 instances. Brendan Gregg, a member of the performance and OS engineering team at Netflix, shows how to choose Amazon EC2 instance types, how to choose between Xen modes (HVM, PV, or PVHVM), and the importance of Amazon EC2 features such SR-IOV for bare-metal performance.
2017How Netflix Encodes at Scale
In this session, Netflix explores the various strategies employed by the encoding service to automate management of a heterogeneous collection of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances, resolve compute contention, and distribute instances based on priority and workload. The Netflix encoding team is responsible for transcoding different types of media sources to a large number of media formats to support all Netflix devices.
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Business Transformation
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2020
Netflix Connects with 100 Million Customers in 190 Countries Using Amazon Simple Email Service
Before migrating to Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), Netflix maintained an in-house solution for sending email. 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.
2020Untangling Multi-Account Management with ConsoleMe
At Netflix, the Cloud Infrastructure Security Team manages permissions across hundreds of accounts. In this session, learn about a Netflix tool called ConsoleMe, developed to address this issue securely, reduce inconsistencies and delays experienced by end users, and lower the multi-account management burden. ConsoleMe simplifies permissions management by showing Netflix cloud resources in a single interface.
2020Simplifying Delivery as Code with Spinnaker and Kubernetes
Software delivery can seem simple at first. Step 1: Build code. Step 2: Deploy application. Step 3: The end. Complexity often sneaks into our processes uninvited, disguised as scale, testing, auditing, and sharing. In this session, Netflix and AWS discuss Spinnaker, an open-source continuous-deployment tool that helps transition from an imperative mix of pipelines and stages to a more declarative description of end goals and bring the “delightful” back to “delivery.”
2018Lessons from Netflix on Migrating to the Cloud
A two-day outage unveiled an imminent capacity crunch, prompting Netflix to explore cloud service providers and ultimately choose AWS. At first, Netflix adopted Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 for foundational compute and storage services. The company then steadily expanded its migration to AWS. Now, Netflix is all-in on AWS, supporting its more than 100 million customers with a fully cloud-based architecture and no longer managing its own data centers.
2017Netflix Realizes Multi-Region Resiliency on Amazon Route 53
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.
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Security Compliance
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2020
How Netflix Thinks About Cybersecurity
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.
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Outside AWS
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2021
How Netflix Used NICE DCV from AWS to Enable Distributed Creative Workforce
Netflix has an ambitious goal to create more content than any other studio and empower a diverse global community of storytellers. That means supporting artists, editors, and other creatives with solutions that put powerful compute at their fingertips anywhere in the world—a job suited for NICE DCV and the globally-distributed infrastructure offered by AWS.
2020How Netflix Engineering Supports Content Creation
Hear from Ionnis Papapanagiotou, engineering manager for storage and data integrations at Netflix, as he speaks about how Netflix Platform Engineering supports studio and content operations and how Netflix handles media storage infrastructure and asset management using Amazon S3.
2021The Netflix Tech Blog: ConsoleMe: A Central Control Plane for AWS Permissions and Access
Growth in the cloud has exploded—making it easier than ever to create infrastructure on the fly—but that means there's an ever-growing support burden to ensure proper security authentication and authorization, cloud hygiene, and scalable processes. Learn how Netflix Cloud Infrastructure Security helped solve this challenge by open-sourcing two new tools for managing multi-account AWS permissions and access: ConsoleMe and its CLI utility, Weep.
2020The Netflix Tech Blog: Unbundling Data Science Workflows with Metaflow and AWS Step Functions
Learn how Netflix leveraged AWS Step Functions as its first open-source production scheduler, reducing operational burden while maintaining high availability.
About Netflix
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.
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