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The Evolution of Container Usage at Netflix

techblog.netflix.com

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Re: The Evolution of Container Usage at Netflix

#121

Post by yomly »

savanaly wrote: post #115
rsync wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Reliability also matters differently for video than it does for normal web traffic. It's one thing to shuttle 5GB (or whatever) of data over the course of an hour. It's another thing to shuttle 5GB of data with no hiccups for an hour." Speaking of which ... I notice that while youtube continues to buffer video while paused, netflix (and many, many other video players online) do not. So while netflix will auto-adjust…

Probably too many cases where they deliver a bunch of content while it's paused and then the content never gets played. More than half the people who pause it probably end up closing the tab without finishing the video, so one can save a lot of bandwidth by only delivering the data when it's needed. A totally unsupported hypothesis.

I arrived at the same conclusion when I realised that YouTube no longer buffers the video all the way through to the end on mobile anymore. I miss being able to buffer a (long) video for offline playback when riding public transport.

Re: The Evolution of Container Usage at Netflix

#122

Post by brendangregg »

nailer wrote: post #3

They're killing performance (one of the main reasons to use containers) and adding a massive extra layer of management if they're running containers on EC2. I suspect Netflix are too wedded to AWS (which is weird as Amazon is their biggest threat) but Triton or Red Shift (both of which actually isolate containers using SmartOS and SELinux respectively) make way more sense for other people who want to use the blazing…

We get fast performance when we need to, and there's a number of EC2 technologies that help with that.

Re: The Evolution of Container Usage at Netflix

#123

Post by yomly »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #111
zaidos wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the core of their product. However, there are a lot of by-products and back office software needed to run the company. As a consumer, you most likely are only perceiving a small percentage of the technology running a company. - Applications for all devices Netflix is on (TVs, Phones, Displays, Roku, Apple TV, etc.) and all the support around it. - Recommendation and analytical software within Netflix. Not eve…

Most of these stuff are also done by large corporate IT departments such as banks. They all consider it pretty routine and are not writing engineering blog posts.

Maybe the engineering community as a whole be better for it if so much duplication of work wasn't going on behind closed doors.

Sure, you don't want to publicize things which could be a competitive advantage to your company, but I bet these banks of yours wish weren't sitting on huge heavy custom-rolled COBOL codebases right now...

Re: The Evolution of Container Usage at Netflix

#124

Post by brendangregg »

nailer wrote: post #76
jhall1468 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is helped if the second layer further automates deployment. I would imagine Netflix is better at understanding its velocity than we are.

Yep but Netflix also has a decade of large scale arch wielded to AWS that we don't. They might not be deploying containers on VMs on bare metal because they want to, but because they /have/ to.

Mind quantifying this overhead you assume containers-on-metal vs VMs will solve?

Re: The Evolution of Container Usage at Netflix

#125

Post by johansch »

yomly wrote: post #89
lmkg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one point, Netflix video streaming accounted for something absurd like 20% of all Internet traffic in the country. Regardless of whether it "scaled incredibly well," I would imagine there are still novel issues with that much scaling. Reliability also matters differently for video than it does for normal web traffic. It's one thing to shuttle 5GB (or whatever) of data over the course of an hour. It's another thing…

Beat me to it. I am sure a large part Netflix's success is how seamless its products are: there's minimal to no loading time and the video stream is virtually always smooth - including during times of action/high frame rate. Creating a video streaming platform is one thing, but creating a content delivery platform that is effectively as reliable as TV that is also cost efficient is no small task if you ask me...

Bullcrap. The tech is good enough (but not that much better beyond that level). >90% of the success comes from the content creation/licensing strategy/execution and marketing. I.e. non-tech.

At this point it's a bit like arguing that Disney's great success in Bluray sales comes from their encoding/Bluray mastering expertise.

Re: The Evolution of Container Usage at Netflix

#126

Post by kasey_junk »

protomyth wrote: post #10
kasey_junk wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were fairly early and fairly vocal proponents of moving to cloud based systems. I haven't looked in awhile but last I checked all but their CDN was running on AWS.

I thought their CDN was FreeBSD machines and everything else was on AWS.

Yeah that was my impression too.

Re: The Evolution of Container Usage at Netflix

#127

Post by joshbaptiste »

yomly wrote: post #121
savanaly wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably too many cases where they deliver a bunch of content while it's paused and then the content never gets played. More than half the people who pause it probably end up closing the tab without finishing the video, so one can save a lot of bandwidth by only delivering the data when it's needed. A totally unsupported hypothesis.

I arrived at the same conclusion when I realised that YouTube no longer buffers the video all the way through to the end on mobile anymore. I miss being able to buffer a (long) video for offline playback when riding public transport.

Ditto, for this case I youtube-dl prior and watch on mobile VLC

Re: The Evolution of Container Usage at Netflix

#128

Post by therealdrag0 »

aquilaFiera wrote: post #69
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #52

Netflix seems so over engineered to me. They basically have a catalog of a few thousand movies that are negotiated months in advance of actual use. Basically, they just need to encode them and put them on a box and ship them to edge caches. Caching immutable data scales incredibly well.I would also bet that 99.99% of the movies people actually watch on Netflix, would fit on a single box. In regard to the analytics, t…

This sounds like one of those developer estimates that takes 10x longer than stated.

Anyone up for the "make Netflix in a weekend challenge"?

Re: The Evolution of Container Usage at Netflix

#129

Post by alpha_squared »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #52

Netflix seems so over engineered to me. They basically have a catalog of a few thousand movies that are negotiated months in advance of actual use. Basically, they just need to encode them and put them on a box and ship them to edge caches. Caching immutable data scales incredibly well.I would also bet that 99.99% of the movies people actually watch on Netflix, would fit on a single box. In regard to the analytics, t…

> Google, Facebook, Baidu, Amazon, the self driving car companies are doing cutting edge stuff in terms of scalability and analysis, but not Netflix.

I think you're missing a quantifier of some sort. Perhaps "consumer-facing"? Of any AWS customer, Netflix is far and away the leader in understanding and making use of AWS. It pushes the limits more often than not.

Their scalability, failure/recovery handling and (assumed) cost-effective deployments are _the_ standard in AWS and cloud computing. They even have an open-source toolset[0] for testing your infrastructure against failures and recovery that's quickly being picked up by several other companies to harden their infrastructure.

Then you realize that regularly, throughout the day, they're intentionally bringing their own infrastructure down and they can still operate with nary a hiccup. I wouldn't call that over-engineered.

[0] https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy

Re: The Evolution of Container Usage at Netflix

#130

Post by Diederich »

sofaofthedamned wrote: post #112
Diederich wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's rather rare to see off the shelf technologies (open or closed) that scale to the top 5%. This makes sense because the techniques required at that level are pretty different, and don't apply well to other situations. So, making an off the shelf product that actually does scale to the top 5% rarely makes sense, since, at best, the customer base will be limited. In the average case, though, the customer base will b…

Funny you should mention Walmart. I went to visit them in ~1992 when they were the biggest user of Teradata at the time. Never used Teradata after that, but i'm interviewing with them in the UK next week...

Yup. WalMart was doing big data analytics, mixed in with a lot of real-time processing, many years before those became a thing in the rest of the industry.

If you don't mind me asking, what kind of position are you looking at in the UK next week?

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