Monday, February 15, 2016

Netflix Goes Full-on Cloud Only

Netflix closed its last remaining dedicated data center. All of Netflix' business infrastructure -- and there is a lot of it -- runs in AWS. This includes the streaming video we all enjoy, to managing its employee and customer data. Leveraging scalability of Amazon Web Services seems to be the main motivation: these days, Netflix has "...eight times more customers using its video streaming service than it did in 2008, when it started using AWS. The streaming application is also constantly changing as more and more features get added and relies on more and more data." While Amazon and Netflix are competitors, this also makes them business partners.

And Netflix is not just innovative, they share. At Network World, we read that "...During the past two years Netflix has pulled back the curtains to provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse into how it runs one of the most popular video streaming websites on the Internet, almost entirely in the public cloud. The company has open sourced dozens of tools it’s developed internally. In doing so, some argue that Netflix is turning into one of the most important cloud computing companies in the industry, not only by proving that a company making $3.7 billion annually can run some of its most critical workloads in the public cloud, but also by sharing with developers how it’s being done and providing others with a path to follow."

Remember that Amazon.com is built around the model of high-volume, low-margin e-commerce, while its Amazon Instant Video and other streaming services are basically add-ons. For Netflix, video streaming is the company.

So if Netflix can be 100% cloud-based, who else will follow?

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