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Netflix to Shut Down Last Datacenter

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Re: Netflix to Shut Down Last Datacenter

#71

Post by icebraining »

Animats wrote: post #55

This is very strange. Amazon is in the pay per view streaming video business itself.[1] Netflix is outsourcing their entire business to a direct competitor. At what point will Amazon decide that they don't need Netflix? Or perhaps there's an acquisition or merger coming. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Prime-Instant-Video/b?node=2676882011

At what point will Amazon decide that they don't need Netflix?

And do what? "We'll jack up the prices if you compete with us" is not good publicity.

Besides, it's not that uncommon. For example, the next iPhone will have a CPU from Samsung.

Re: Netflix to Shut Down Last Datacenter

#72

Post by illumen »

deanCommie wrote: post #69
jules wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is elasticity really an advantage of EC2? Dedicated is so much cheaper that you can just overprovision massively and still come out cheaper than EC2.

Disregarding the fact that the E stands for Elasticity... Yes, Elasticity is THE advantage for Netflix when it comes to using EC2. Consider the vast differences in usage they have in North America during the evening after dinner vs during the middle of the night. I can only imagine their fleet capacity goes up and down drastically every single day. This amounts to huge savings over having the bare metal.

Not just North America... but all around the world. Netflix is global, and EC2 is global.

Re: Netflix to Shut Down Last Datacenter

#73

Post by ranman »

fiberoptick wrote: post #30

I've never understood why so many companies are comfortable giving Amazon such leverage over their business infrastructure. Could someone explain why this is a good move in spite of the risk that Amazon could jack their prices up in the future?

Wait... since when has AWS ever raised their prices? They've consistently lowered prices for better services... something like 50+ price reductions in the past 7 years.

Re: Netflix to Shut Down Last Datacenter

#74

Post by ranman »

Wingman4l7 wrote: post #66
function_seven wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Total guess on my part, but I'd imagine Netflix has locked-in long-term pricing. Of course, there's the opposite danger of the rest of the world getting cheaper...

Reminds me of how airlines have been bitten in the butt with a similar future-speculation method that they use to purchase fuel.

Except that this isn't fuel... the prices have consistently trended down for 7 years and have no indications of stopping.

Re: Netflix to Shut Down Last Datacenter

#75

Post by brianwawok »

msiebuhr wrote: post #62
anotherangrydev wrote: post #10

Do you think they have a special deal w/ Amazon? Otherwise I imagine that's a really expensive bill. Do you think they're doing it because its cheaper when you account for things at a larger scale? Like, reduced liabilities, payrolls, CapEx, whatever? Or is it more expensive but still "easier" and they go with it? I really REALLY would like to hear everything from everyone about this, because right now I'm facing tha…

Another perspective; location and staffing. Last first: Getting enough competent people to whatever you have. Just getting people that knows the difference between rm -rf / and rm -rf ./, not to plug both ends of a cable into the same switch/router, ... can be quite hard. If you have a premium product running on a few hundred machines, AWS doesn't actually eat that much margin compared to having your own 24/7 staff &…

you still need ops guys just not hardware guys. for a smaller company it would be the same guy anyway no? a company with 10 or 20 servers doesn't need a dedicated hardware tech.

Re: Netflix to Shut Down Last Datacenter

#76

Post by jules »

deanCommie wrote: post #69
jules wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is elasticity really an advantage of EC2? Dedicated is so much cheaper that you can just overprovision massively and still come out cheaper than EC2.

Disregarding the fact that the E stands for Elasticity... Yes, Elasticity is THE advantage for Netflix when it comes to using EC2. Consider the vast differences in usage they have in North America during the evening after dinner vs during the middle of the night. I can only imagine their fleet capacity goes up and down drastically every single day. This amounts to huge savings over having the bare metal.

Does it really though? The netflix stats show that at most it's a 2x saving: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-72J2TkcP4j0/TxcdvDk58VI/AAAAAAAABA...

And EC2 is more than 2x as expensive as dedicated...

Don't get me wrong, EC2 has advantages, but it's not cost (unless Netflix is paying much less than the public prices, which is possible).

Re: Netflix to Shut Down Last Datacenter

#77

Post by hvidgaard »

adrianbg wrote: post #56
hvidgaard wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering how many millions Netflix pays Amazon every single month, a team of highly skilled engineers is a drop in the bucket, and if switching means they can save enough, they'll do it.

"The closing of Netflix’s last data center has been seven years in the making." Does that sound like a drop in the bucket?

Compared to the running cost of their streaming service, yes. Besides, I like to believe (yes believe, because non of us outside of Netflix would be able to verify) that they've spend that much time such that they're far less dependent on the underlying architecture.

Re: Netflix to Shut Down Last Datacenter

#78

Post by merb »

jules wrote: post #76
deanCommie wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disregarding the fact that the E stands for Elasticity... Yes, Elasticity is THE advantage for Netflix when it comes to using EC2. Consider the vast differences in usage they have in North America during the evening after dinner vs during the middle of the night. I can only imagine their fleet capacity goes up and down drastically every single day. This amounts to huge savings over having the bare metal.

Does it really though? The netflix stats show that at most it's a 2x saving: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-72J2TkcP4j0/TxcdvDk58VI/AAAAAAAABA... And EC2 is more than 2x as expensive as dedicated... Don't get me wrong, EC2 has advantages, but it's not cost (unless Netflix is paying much less than the public prices, which is possible).

That's only for NA

Re: Netflix to Shut Down Last Datacenter

#79

Post by merb »

People on HN just don't understand that the Basic Hosting company won't give a scalable Network for free. And with scalable Network I mean a Physical / Virtual Network where you could connect / disconnect Nodes and connect it with arbitrary Networks. And that's basically something which costs a huge amount of money especially when you want to connect two Locations. When you need HA and don't get such a network you would need to create a Overlay Network over VPN, etc by yourself which could be quite hard to manage (even for a low amount of servers) In germany we could buy Virtual servers as low as 5-10 Euro / month however you can't buy 3 in different locations and they are connected with an private internal network for free (there aren't even many hosters that will do that, i don't think there are any outside of the saas platforms) however you could rent non virtual servers and buy additional stuff on these Hosters which adds a huge costs per month. So running on AWS / Google Cloud / Azure / etc could be really cheap. It just depends on the Things you need.

Edit: Also AWS gives you a lot of credits for just doing surveys for their new stuff. I have so many credits so that I run my private gitlab instance on AWS and it costs me nothing. I never got a credit of my previous Hoster which I used over 10 years. On AWS I just got a 200 USD Credit at the start since I missed my Free year (also only cloud providers giving you credits, the most other Hosters won't do that and they bareley give you something new on AWS. You could now run a Website for basically nothing just with AWS Lambda which costs nearly nothing.)

Re: Netflix to Shut Down Last Datacenter

#80

Post by mdpopescu »

icebraining wrote: post #70
mdpopescu wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a company where the whole server room was flooded. They had to replace everything and restore stuff from backups. Two weeks later, they had to do it all over again because something went wrong with the air conditioning and the servers got cooked. I kept recommending going with AWS because of that... I no longer work there, but as far as I know they're still running their own servers.

Why AWS and not just co-locating the servers somewhere?

I wasn't dead set on AWS, I was just using it as an example. Any sufficiently large company would have worked.
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