81–90 of 126 posts
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They won't 100% be on AWS, but probably close to 95%. Netflix owns its own media CDN.
So almost all of their bandwidth is handled outside of AWS. I would wager a guess that bandwidth is quite a bit more than 5% of their ops bill.
I find it to be a peculiar business decision to completely (as much as you can) migrate to one of your largest competitors' cloud service. It seems like Microsoft is the only, of the larger cloud providers, that doesn't -really- compete with Netflix. (Google has YouTube, and I guess even Microsoft has a much smaller Windows Store presence.) Even if Amazon can't access the raw data, they could see how you're utilizing…
> Even if Amazon can't access the raw data, they could see how you're utilizing it to improve their own video service, and they get the benefit of billing you and potentially using their pricing leverage to squeeze your margins. So you're saying Amazon is going to risk millions of dollars so they can make a few more bucks on video streaming, which is like 3 levels down from their primary business? Prove it. I had an…
Looking at Amazon's Q1 2016 Financial Results [0], page 8, we see that net sales of non-AWS amounts to ~$26B, and AWS is ~$2.5B. From the Segment Highlights section (same page), AWS sales is 9% of total sales.
AWS beats non-AWS income only because there were losses in international; ignoring international, it's a $16m difference.
Looking at page 14, Media sales in North America and International sum to $5.6B. Media sales alone is double AWS's sales of $2.5B (page 13). Profit margins are way higher for AWS, so there's still a lot of room for a larger income difference between the two segments.
Based on this, someone doing media streaming as their primary business needs to be aware of who they are in bed with infrastructure-wise, but I agree that it doesn't mean that AWS isn't worth using just because Amazon is in the same market/area. Media sales are a big portion of Amazon's non-AWS sales, and being digital are most likely fewer headaches than physical goods; but not so big of a portion that one needs to worry about Amazon being the 800lb gorilla that would need to be contended with. It's more likely that Amazon is a threat to Netflix on licensing deals and content offerings (IMO, Netflix is slightly stronger, but neither are great, in content offering).
Is Amazon going to pull the rug out from under Netflix? Not if they want anti-trust attention. Is Amazon going to disallow the Netflix app to run on their devices? I suspect no, since they seem to want to create a platform rather than a walled garden when it comes to devices and media. Is Amazon going to undermine the trust in AWS by using AWS customer's data, or metadata about their customers, for their own gain? Probably not. If I'm going to put money on who's going to do "the right thing", for businesses and tech as a whole, it's going to be on the likes of Amazon rather than, say, Oracle.
Looking closer at (just) this (document), the growth numbers are such that it could go either way as to which revenue stream will eventually be the major contributor to Amazon revenue streams. That's a significant reduction in losses (-60%) over Q1 2015, so International turning around over the next year or so could keep AWS and non-AWS income neck and neck.
[0] http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9N...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even if Amazon can't access the raw data, they could see how you're utilizing it to improve their own video service, and they get the benefit of billing you and potentially using their pricing leverage to squeeze your margins. So you're saying Amazon is going to risk millions of dollars so they can make a few more bucks on video streaming, which is like 3 levels down from their primary business? Prove it. I had an…
>>Prove it. I had an argument with my last company about this very issue. If Amazon's primary business was video delivery, then that would make a lot of sense. But where does Amazon's primary revenue stream actually come from? That's right, it's AWS. Let me try. Earlier Amazon's primary business was selling books, then it "became" selling almost every object that can be legally sold, and now you are saying that it "i…
They used a DRBD replicated MySQL. Wonder why they used MySQL over PostgresSQL then.. Would be great to know if they looked that up aswell.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even if Amazon can't access the raw data, they could see how you're utilizing it to improve their own video service, and they get the benefit of billing you and potentially using their pricing leverage to squeeze your margins. So you're saying Amazon is going to risk millions of dollars so they can make a few more bucks on video streaming, which is like 3 levels down from their primary business? Prove it. I had an…
Good points. I'd just like to point out that, there are "political redundancy" reasons to diversify to multiple (cloud) providers: you could easily get in a billing dispute with a single vendor - if that means your entire business grinds to a halt, then that puts you in a very weak and vulnerable position. I don't know if the extra effort of using eg. Google and AWS is worth in order to "stay up when AWS goes down" -…
Netflix is a marquee AWS customer. The PR damage of Netflix even making noise about leaving AWS would be terrible for the service as it fights for market share against Azure and Google. Netflix will get their way.
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> Even if Amazon can't access the raw data, they could see how you're utilizing it to improve their own video service, and they get the benefit of billing you and potentially using their pricing leverage to squeeze your margins. So you're saying Amazon is going to risk millions of dollars so they can make a few more bucks on video streaming, which is like 3 levels down from their primary business? Prove it. I had an…
>Amazon may be an excellent retailer, but they spend just as much money as they make on the shipping and fulfillment side to get shit on your doorstep faster and cheaper than anyone else out there. Each person that spends money on Amazon can only really spend a few hundred dollars per year. But even a small company that's entirely hosted on AWS, like 70% of the companies I've worked for, pays Amazon thousands of doll…
The first part is irrelevant, because almost none of those people will ever buy a service from AWS. The second part is false.
An order of a magnitude more businesses are utilizing AWS than 'people.' AWS doesn't exist for consumers or average people, it's for businesses. That was the whole point of its existence: the primary customers of AWS are businesses, and always will be. It's where the radical majority of their sales come from, businesses with greater than 10 employees; not from solo developers spending $37 per month, and absolutely not from your average person that doesn't know anything about cloud computing.
I find it to be a peculiar business decision to completely (as much as you can) migrate to one of your largest competitors' cloud service. It seems like Microsoft is the only, of the larger cloud providers, that doesn't -really- compete with Netflix. (Google has YouTube, and I guess even Microsoft has a much smaller Windows Store presence.) Even if Amazon can't access the raw data, they could see how you're utilizing…
> Even if Amazon can't access the raw data, they could see how you're utilizing it to improve their own video service, and they get the benefit of billing you and potentially using their pricing leverage to squeeze your margins. So you're saying Amazon is going to risk millions of dollars so they can make a few more bucks on video streaming, which is like 3 levels down from their primary business? Prove it. I had an…
Dropped Oracle, using MySQL. Why not use PostgreSQL instead?
I work on the Netflix Billing Team. PostgreSQL was indeed a very attractive option, but we wanted to keep a path to Aurora open. When we were working on the migration, Aurora was still in beta, so instead of going to Aurora directly, we decided run our own MySQL instances on EC2.
Does this mean Amazon can mine Netflix's data to improve their Prime Video services?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good points. I'd just like to point out that, there are "political redundancy" reasons to diversify to multiple (cloud) providers: you could easily get in a billing dispute with a single vendor - if that means your entire business grinds to a halt, then that puts you in a very weak and vulnerable position. I don't know if the extra effort of using eg. Google and AWS is worth in order to "stay up when AWS goes down" -…
The billing redundancy argument would be applicable generally but in the case Netflix on AWS is not something Netflix has to worry about. Netflix is a marquee AWS customer. The PR damage of Netflix even making noise about leaving AWS would be terrible for the service as it fights for market share against Azure and Google. Netflix will get their way.