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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

#91

Post by notyourday »

ryanianian wrote: post #81
notyourday wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Customer Appreciation Funds/Customer Acquisition Funds/etc.

"We have $500M available this year that we can spend to lock in $1B in revenue. If you give us $1B in revenue, we would spend $500M on helping you to achieve your objectives. If you give us $100M in revenue, we give spend $50M in helping you to achieve your objectives"

So say I need to spend $10M on some project and I am looking at $20M of spend on hosting. You are offering me 10M CAF. I spend $20M on hosting, and 0 on some other project - instead you spend your 10M CAF on helping me with my project, which of course looks really good on my books.

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

#92

Post by chrisweekly »

joevandyk wrote: post #57
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.

I’m sure you are aware but AWS has a newish loaf balancer now: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/appl...

loaf -> load, lol

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

#93

Post by mrits »

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.

One of the reasons I don't like working on GCP or Azure is because I prefer ELB.

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

#94

Post by esturk »

If more people start using GCP, then in the near future, GCP's prices will go up. In contrast, AWS prices may come down to compete with GCP. And when they reach close parity, things will begin to commoditize and get even cheaper across the board. I see this being a good thing overall as an industry.

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

#95

Post by mrkurt »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #87
cortesoft wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I work for a company people use to build CDNs. Just another turtle. :D

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

#96

Post by mrkurt »

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.

Shameless plug: we have an open source tool you can build stuff like this on. It'll run any logic you can implement in JavaScript, we have people doing things like "send traffic to backend with lowest latency" already, it'd be pretty easy to pull in some API data to pick based on cost.

https://github.com/superfly/fly

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

#100

Post by martimarkov »

treis wrote: post #72
hinkley wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How big doesn’t netflix have to get before it’s in their best interests to build data centers of their own? Toolchains are maturing. They’ve figured out ways to get multiple uses from the same hardware. They shouldn’t be beholden to the rollout or geographical plans of two cloud providers. I don’t even mean build out their entire infrastructure. I think even running your base load on your own hardware makes you under…

They have data centers of their own and distribute all of their own content. AWS powers the UI requests and their back office number crunching stuff. Everything after you push play is done via Netflix's own hardware.

Any links so I can read more on the subject? I’d love to get my hands on some material describing their infrastructure.
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