Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theinformation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 146 posts

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

#81

Post by ryanianian »

notyourday wrote: post #75
ryanianian wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll play a few games with contracts to spread the costs around (e.g. giving n% discounts for m years of reserved capacity). You probably won't get much just by saying "I can just go to GCP" and asking for the world. The more you spend, the more distinct services you buy, and the longer you want to commit the steeper the discount. I've seen up to 10% but I'm sure they do more for bigger customers.

They get CAF. When CAF runs out, pricing shoots up.

What's CAF? Googling wasn't very helpful :)

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

#82

Post by [deleted] »

wiremine wrote: post #61
awakeasleep wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really playing these companies against each other would mean dynamically balancing your services across the providers based on pricing

I've love to see some open source tools that manage this automagically for me. :-) It would also require an architecture that supports multiple interfaces. Totally doable (the facade pattern comes to mind) but you'd want to calculate the TCO to see it works out financially.

[deleted]

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

#83

Post by acdha »

nandhp wrote: post #58
Twirrim wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For years Dell would let it "leak" out to the press that they were looking at supporting AMD chips. It would happen every year like clockwork. Then after a month you'd hear that Dell and Intel had come up with a new deal to remain Intel exclusive.

Hasn't Dell offered AMD chips for a long time? Dell currently sells AMD-based laptops, and was doing so back in 2008 as well. For example, this Ryzen laptop: http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-inspiron-15-...

Before then – in the 90s both Intel and Microsoft used a lot of backroom deals to keep big vendors exclusive. If memory serves it took the Opteron’s crushing performance advantage before we started seeing that break for Intel servers; Linux users for years were stuck paying for OEM Windows installs which were never used.

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

#84

Post by scarface74 »

supernovae wrote: post #9
forgot-my-pw wrote: post #4

I 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…

I've used most of Hashicorp's tooling - Consul, Nomad, Vault, etc. - and I consider myself to be a Hashicorp fanboy. But if you're spinning up a bunch of VMs "in the cloud" and that's all you're doing, you're not taking advantage of the platform. The idea behind using AWS is not just to avoid your own capital infrastructure, it's also to allow someone else to do the "undifferentiated heavy lifting". In our case:

Consul -> ParameterStore

Vault -> KMS/Cognito/IAM

Nomad -> Elastic Container Services/Fargate (serverless Docker)/Lambda

SQL Server -> RDS -> Aurora

Memcached -> ElastiCache (Memcached protocol)

Consul+Fabio (service discovery/load balancing) -> Elastic Load Balancers/Route 53/Autoscaling

VSTS (MS's hosted CI/CD platform) -> AWS Code Build/Code Deploy/Code Pipeline

"not marrying yourself to a one cloud provider" is equivalent to "coding using a repository pattern to access the database" in both cases people claim to not wanting to tie themselves to one vendor and then they realize that they aren't taking advantage of what the vendor has to offer.

In my experience, no one wants to go through the pain of moving to another vendor just to save a little money.

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

#85

Post by illumin8 »

skywhopper wrote: post #7

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…

I agree with most of what you said, however, Netflix most definitely does not operate at a scale well beyond what most AWS managed services can address.

AWS managed services literally sit behind billions of devices, a scale that makes Netflix look small in comparison: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/27/apple-now-relies-on-google...

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

#86

Post by thebootstrapper »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #60

My prediction is that by 2020 Netflix will move a significant portion of their IT to Google Cloud. Why? Most of their architecture is microservices / linux containers / serverless, and Google is simply way better positioned there (with Kubernetes as their crown jewel). They will eventually win. Source: no source, just my "expert" opinion (6 years at AWS, 2 at VMware's cloud, currently CEO at a startup).

Isn't Netflix invested heavily on Mesos than k8s for their container orchestration? for example Titus https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/tagged/titus Fenzo https://github.com/Netflix/Fenzo

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

#87

Post by dsfyu404ed »

cortesoft wrote: post #78
awakeasleep wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really playing these companies against each other would mean dynamically balancing your services across the providers based on pricing

I work for a large CDN. Lots of big customers do this, they shift their traffic around between different CDNs based on a lot of metrics, including price and performance.

I also work for a CDN.

Some of our stuff dynamically utilizes other CDNs. A customer might go try and test deploy something and we might use (AWS or whatever) to do it.

It's CDNs all the way down.

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

#88

Post by notyourday »

lallysingh wrote: post #43
bluejekyll wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The most fun thing about startup world is that it pretends that normal rules of economics and accounting do not apply to it (until a startup runs out of money)

$X in CapEx makes balance sheet look better than $X in OpEx.

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

#89

Post by cptskippy »

Cshelton wrote: post #67
KirinDave wrote: post #25

Firstly: not very new. Hasn't Netflix been at this for a long time? 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.

AWS's ELB/ALB have been rock solid for us. Not sure what you are referring to when you say 'antiquated infrastructure'?

Antiquated doesn't mean unstable or unusable. It means old fashioned. It's not the new hotness.

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

#90

Post by awill »

assblaster wrote: post #37
yellow_postit wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google also may have a competing service if they ever figure out what they want YouTube Red to be.

Cobra Kai is a pretty good example of the future of YouTube Red: actual Hollywood talent and directors, instead of YouTube stars with higher production values.

I'm as much a fan of Karate Kid as the next guy, but calling both Johnny and Daniel-san 'hollywood talent' is questionable. I'd not seen either of them in anything from Hollywood since the 1989 Karate Kid part 3
Post reply on HN