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Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud

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Re: Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud

#41
This could also be titled "Netflix Ensures its AWS Discounts Continue"

AWS sales teams are quite responsive to threats of moving in terms of continuing discounts. I've drawn up migration plans solely to use as leverage against AWS for deep discounts in the past.

Re: Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud

#42

I'm surprised they have thought to move some of their infrastructure in house. The clearly have the scale where this would make sense, but it may be that AWS and GCP provide them with such low special prices that it doesn't make sense...

The problem might just be that it's genuinely incredibly difficult to get infrastructure right at this level, and the cost to move in-house is still too high, even accounting for the savings over the long term.

Re: Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cloud doesn't really have economies of scale unless your workloads scale opposite of pricing - which they very rarely do. For small shops, sure, but for the example of 500 instances running - you could lease space and grow with physical servers at a better economic scale. If you only need 500 servers for 1 busy season and can drop back down to 100 then stay in the cloud. If you need 500 always running instances a…

In general, I think it’s a wash. The margins you save on end up costing you in other ways, such as development velocity and having access to easily deployed high-scale solutions like dynamo and managed instances like RDS. it takes time and organizational know-how to get to a point where similar things can be managed in the same way as AWS. Again, there are niche segments where this might not be true, 500 constant mac…

The margins you're paying for include functionality you don't use and your own cost of integration, observation, and management of their stuff. The principal advantage of using a cloud provider is avoiding capital costs and any useful apis they have that you'd otherwise have to develop/maintain in-house.

Re: Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah yes, I mixed that up. :/ Though who rents movies from Microsoft? And they don't have a subscription-based service for it, like both Amazon and Google do.

Xbox owners.

Re: Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud

#45

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.

Isn't it better to be in bed with your competitor so as to have a solid claim against being declared a monopoly?

Depending on the details, that could be considered a trust and then you'd be in the same boat as if you were declared a monopoly.

Re: Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud

#46
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is assuming you can do everything at the same efficiency level as Amazon or Google. It's likely that you wouldn't be able to outperform on these metrics to a degree that it would make the profit margin difference a wash.

Re: Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud

#47

I 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?

No one would dare try to sell a set top box in the US that didn't support Netflix.

Re: Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I completely agree. I jokingly tell everyone I know using AWS to "not use us-east1" and that they need to use another region not just AZs...and they always laugh and say "you were right" with us-east goes down. 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.

How often does us-east-1 go down? I know of about 4 big outages in the last 7 years but you're making it sound like it happens much more frequently. Is there a list of outages somewhere?

Re: Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah yes, I mixed that up. :/ Though who rents movies from Microsoft? And they don't have a subscription-based service for it, like both Amazon and Google do.

I rent movies and tv shows from Microsoft all the time. They have some great sales.

Re: Netflix, Long an AWS Customer, Tests Waters on Google Cloud

#50

I would think if a business use more than 500 servers, it would make sense to start considering having your own datacenter?

It's a good question, but depends on your workload.

Netflix is all about content delivery -- which is both distributed and highly variable over the day/year.

Using Cloud means Netflix can deploy closer to the customer. Plus scale up and down as required. If they did this themselves it would be quite expensive and involve a lot of redundancy.

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