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Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud
11–20 of 146 posts
Re: Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud
#12I think long term, Netflix needs redundancy, especially when the primary supplier is a competitor in the same space.
Couldn’t YouTube also be seen as a competitor?
Re: Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud
#13I think long term, Netflix needs redundancy, especially when the primary supplier is a competitor in the same space.
Yeah. It might only be a matter of time until, to avoid "customer confusion", Amazon decides to no longer have Amazon services provide things to Netflix customers?
Re: Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud
#14I would think if a business use more than 500 servers, it would make sense to start considering having your own datacenter?
It's different for everyone. If your 500 servers are for storage, S3/GCS will beat you in cost. For compute, that might be a different story, but then you still have to consider regionality, networking, etc.
Let's be honest, even in the public cloud there are very few orgs that can survive regional failures and most people solve locality through CDN's for content delivery which means a private datacenter isn't really that different from public cloud for most orgs. Also, when when orgs move to the cloud they don't fire their networking team, they still have deskopts/laptops/servers/security devices/printers and large lans/wans to connect / peer already and these teams could staff up for private datacenter without really adding additional costs that aren't already incurred as part of doing business anyway. Our private datacenter is a few thousand servers leased space in a colo and we have one "datacenter dude" who handles hardware issues and our network team spends 90% of their time still on corporate infra vs actual supports with colo space. One can take some up front engineering/planning costs to scope out a private datacenter for about the same cost as it is to scope/plan VPC's and peering/connectivity/vpn services.
Re: Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud
#15I would think if a business use more than 500 servers, it would make sense to start considering having your own datacenter?
This isn’t such an obvious decision. Running your own datacenter is difficult. Besides racking and stacking, you need to deal with power and cooling. Most likely you will outsource all of this to a collocations management services initially, which becomes your overhead just like AWS/Google. But they have economies of scale, in addition, they have expertise in managing all of this equipment with very high reliability. They also have tons of spare capacity (elastic) that are at your disposal, you’ll lose this in your own datacenter.
On top of that you need to hire specialists, and 24/7 noc teams, for making sure your site is always up. And it’s not just one, you need a minimum of two, geographically separated so that they are not effected by the same fire, earthquake, power outage from ice/wind/electrical storms.
At the end of the day, You need to beat AWS’ profit margin, and you still would have a huge amount of difficulty being able to match the uptime that you get when you’re so easily able to distribute services across regions and availability zones that are resilient to all the real world problems listed above. And all of those do happen.
Even for the largest of companies, I’m not sure it makes sense to compete with these services except in the most niche of markets (like dropbox and storage).
Re: Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud
#16I would think if a business use more than 500 servers, it would make sense to start considering having your own datacenter?
You really have to factor in the labor costs of infrastructure and operations into that as well. Running your own private "cloud" isn't cheap. And no matter what you do, you aren't going to get even close to feature parity with the public cloud offerings (or even speed, if you are using virtual-machines). There are a lot of trade offs that you have to weigh in that don't always come down to bare dollars and cents.
Everything you'd have to pay for, Amazon or Google has to pay for for you... plus profit margin. At Netflix scale, it's almost impossible for someone else's cloud to be cheaper than running your own, and hiring the necessary staff and acquiring the necessary space and hardware to do so.
I honestly have to wonder if the level of Amazon's discount for Netflix is absurd to the tune of "we lose money doing this" just to retain them. AWS may need Netflix, to make serving it's smaller clients economically viable, more than Netflix needs AWS.
Re: Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud
#17I think long term, Netflix needs redundancy, especially when the primary supplier is a competitor in the same space.
And the standing problem now is that their secondary supplier they're considering is also a competitor in the same space. It's a wonder Netflix isn't testing the waters against Azure, since Microsoft just closed their video sales offerings down.
Microsoft pulled out of the music space, they're still selling & renting movies/shows and content services are a core feature of azure. Netflix uses its own POPS for of its content delivery.
Re: Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud
#18I would think if a business use more than 500 servers, it would make sense to start considering having your own datacenter?
I wouldn't do my own datacenter as in build out a building, but I would certainly lease a cage and build out my own infrastructure at probably half that count. As far as I know, Netflix has POP's for content delivery in many carrier facilities so it's not a pure cloud player by any means. For the cost of 1 year for a single cloud server you can buy a 52 core dell with 256gb ram and a few SSD's and have price/performa…
That's a good distinction. CoLo providers are pretty reasonably priced and most of the larger ones are good at what they do.
There's a HUGE scale difference between a CoLo and your own -- as soon as you start having to negotiate diesel supply contracts yourself things get crazy fast.
Re: Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud
#19Netflix has been "testing the waters" at GCP for years. And as their infrastructure grows, relying on a single cloud provider would be a silly limitation to put on themselves. Disaster-recovery/failover is a very natural use case for multi-cloud deployments. Not to mention that for certain workloads and patterns, GCP is cheaper and better. Netflix operates at a scale well beyond what most AWS managed services can rea…
You don't have to be Netflix to get AWS, GCP and MS to play against each on pricing. I've seen a number of my clients build a prototype on each platforms, and then use it to make final decision. Part of that final decision is having the cloud vendors compete on price.
I personally haven't seen any massive price breaks, but there definitely is room the margins.
Re: Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud
#20I think long term, Netflix needs redundancy, especially when the primary supplier is a competitor in the same space.
Not even that, but because Amazon has a history of not playing nice!