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Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

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Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#91

Post by aaronblohowiak »

curun1r wrote: post #85

> The advantage of having three regions is that any one region can fail, and the other regions will step in handle all the members in the failed region. At a previous employer, we met with AWS engineers who told us that this sort of thinking wasn't correct. Availability zones are for failure tolerance. Regions are conceptually different and for things like moving compute closer to clients, mitigating political instab…

Sometimes there have been region-wide issues. Running cold has its own set of problems. We do not rely exclusively on auto scaling when we do failover.

Disclaimer: while I work at Netflix, these views are not necessarily those of my employer

Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#92

Post by PuffinBlue »

pavs wrote: post #73
virtuallynathan wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good for everyone -- if you are an ISP with 35%+ of your traffic coming from Netflix, you might be begging for these boxes in your network.

Yup, as an ISP owner, I can tell you 70-75% of my traffic come through GGC, for every 1gbps traffic from cache nodes 100mbps on average is pulled from the internet. Even with GGC nodes, it's still very expensive, BW-wise.

I saw another comment on here in the distant past that said an ISP owner decided to pull out the GGC boxes because they would sync vast amounts of data (largely YouTube IIRC) and it wasn't worth it bandwdith wise for them.

It sounds like 10:1 is a decent saving but still objectively a lot of data.

Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#93

Post by PuffinBlue »

will4274 wrote: post #75
Klathmon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

P2P has traditionally not worked out well for companies. Even recently Microsoft tried it for updates, and people were quite angry. I honestly don't see a situation where someone would prefer to use their own bandwidth for a paid service rather than having a server do the heavy lifting. Either as the provider, or the consumer.

> people were quite angry. I don't think this is true. Some enterprises were concerned about the security aspects and asked for greater controls, which Microsoft provided, but Windows 10 has not removed P2P updates, AFAIK.

It has not but I think it's not enabled by default now, and you can declare you want it but limit to a certain amount if on a metered connection, or just turn it on fully.

I think it was the metered connection bit people were annoyed about, especially those who were tethering to their phones and then it downloaded/shared a huge amount of data.

Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#94

Post by beefield »

izacus wrote: post #88
synotna wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, so passively aggressively complaining about DRM is a moot point

It's what customers do in free market to get better service.

Or turn from government regulated monopolistic market to actually free market i.e. torrents.

Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#95

Post by mimerme »

curun1r wrote: post #85

> The advantage of having three regions is that any one region can fail, and the other regions will step in handle all the members in the failed region. At a previous employer, we met with AWS engineers who told us that this sort of thinking wasn't correct. Availability zones are for failure tolerance. Regions are conceptually different and for things like moving compute closer to clients, mitigating political instab…

I think this is another case of "your not really supposed to...but it works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

For your first point, I think it depends on your usage scenario. With a big company that requires good performance to satisfy their users, like Netflix, having multiple regions is a given. But what the article probably missed is that they also most likely use AZs within the same region to mitigate failures, but since they have multiple regions at hand why not use them to mitigate failures as well? And their monthly tests are a simulation of a worst case scenario if an entire region goes down.

As for autoscaling I also think that people think of it as a magic solution. More users? Autoscale. Zone down? Autoscale. But the problem arises when they think that it's instant because it isn't. Things have to happen behind the scenes, but for many people, they only care about what happens on stage, so for them configuring autoscale is just better because it's easier than load balancing on 3 different AZs.

Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#96

Post by donarb »

dominotw wrote: post #54

> Netflix Saves Money In AWS How much of it due to special discount that netflix gets from AWS. Would a company thats not highly visible as netflix save the same amount of money ? > Recommendations. I find netflix recommendations pretty bad. Does it really work for other people?

It's not visibility, it's how much you spend/use. I'll bet there are large companies out there you've never heard of that get just as much of a discount from Amazon as Netflix does.

Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#97

Post by saryant »

temp wrote: post #31

I'd be interested in finding out what happens when I press the thumbs down/up icon on Netflix, because the match ratings that are displayed to me seem to have nothing to do with either my ratings or with my watching history.

AFAIK from some conversations I had at a conference last year with a few Netflix engineers who work on this system, it's sort of realtime. Recommendations are build up using Apache Flink, which provides stateful stream compute.

So your click turns into an event on a Kafka topic which is eventually consumed by Flink, joined with whatever other data sources they need and then written out to a store somewhere. IIRC the various machine learning models exist inside their Flink architecture.

https://ci.apache.org/projects/flink/flink-docs-release-1.4/...

Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#98

Post by saryant »

forgotpassagan wrote: post #86

I love how Netflix is so open about their architecture, but I have one strong criticism. After trying to get Spinnaker running, which is like 10 services for a fairly straightforward application, and reading about how Netflix has Cron jobs running to 'clean up' data inconsistencies... I started to think Google has a better approach to scaling the code. Netflix is strong on eventual consistency, and making services as…

> Netflix is strong on eventual consistency, and making services as small as possible. Having tried to build something in that image, holy shit the issue of distributed transactions becomes a nightmare.

Distributed transactions are a sure sign that your service boundaries have been incorrectly drawn.

Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#99

Post by saryant »

madeofpalk wrote: post #23
wz1000 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it really hard to believe that paying for content is unethical. Your money isn't going to the people who created the content. It is going to cartels that have no interests in common with you, and have massive lobbying power in order to force you to download malware and restrict the access of information from you.

Of course money goes to the creators. I have an actor friend who was in a 'Netflix Original'. He got paid for it. Sure, others are making profits on it but, again, that's not surprising. That's how our society works. I wasn't 'lobbied' or forced to install 'malware'. I'm aware of what's going on (I too have heard of R.M.S.!) and I made a conscious decision to subscribe to such services.

I met RMS once. He spoke at my college's CS department and then gave a campus-wide talk.

At the CS reception he told a retired professor to switch banks and just not tell his wife because the bank didn't support a FOSS browser—while eating the dandruff in his hair.

Later, at the wider talk, he called our IT department fascists for requiring authentication to join the Wifi network, then put a halo on his head, proclaimed himself the Jesus Christ of software and tried to auction off a stuffed gnu to a dead silent crowd.

Good times.

Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#100

Post by ufmace »

jedberg wrote: post #2

> I pulled this chapter together from dozens of sources that were at times somewhat contradictory. Facts on the ground change over time and depend who is telling the story and what audience they're addressing. You know old time journalists had a solution to this. Interviewing subjects with first hand knowledge. I know I rag on highscalability a lot, but I feel like they deserve it. They've written multiple articles a…

I get your point, but how many of these tech companies will actually authorize their employees who know what they're talking about to speak freely with tech reporters about how their system works? I would figure most would redirect you to a PR flunky to feed meaningless corporate-speak to any reporters, and then it's all "Netflix uses the latest internet technology to ensure the best possible viewing experience for all viewers around the world. Unfortunately, the specifics of our system are proprietary and we are unable to discuss that."
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