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I 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
At least from my view, there's a difference in backbone versus corporate space networking, but you're right, most everyone won't ever realize any savings from that side of things.
Netflix 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…
just wondering, how huge (as a percentage) that discount is?
I 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.…
Secondly, everyone should be checking. Not only is Google doing a lot of subsidization, but their services are really really good. My current employer ended up being unable to use them but it's I acutely regret every day I'm forced to build out things Google already has or deal with Amazon's frustratingly antiquated ELB infrastructure.
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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…
Looks like this is paywalled. Edit : Since this is being downvoted, here is the proof: https://screenshots.firefox.com/bgD6FxWvQS4e0sB2/www.theinfo... I have no issue with paywalled-content, it should just be noted that this is, at least for some readers.
However, I'm a subscriber to The Information so here's a share link: https://go.theinformation.com/f2b133baedc57a8c - I think it requres an email, alas, but it's something if people are desperate to read the story.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I 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?
Amazon, on the other hand, will partner and make nice with competitors until they're ready to abandon them. Amazon is planning on supplanting FedEx and UPS and already has its own fleet of cargo planes. Amazon is great for business until they decide they don't need you anymore.