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How Netflix Accurately Attributes eBPF Flow Logs

netflixtechblog.com

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Re: How Netflix Accurately Attributes eBPF Flow Logs

#21

Post by silisili »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #4
butlike wrote: post #2

All that logging and they cant figure out why people are going to other streaming services

Despite their awful UX, I'm always impressed with how reliable their service is, technically speaking. Video is always good and responsive even on less-than-stellar connections, you can leave a show paused for hours, and resume it almost instantly. Their fast.com speed test is always much faster than your regular internet access, I guess thanks to their Open Connect Appliances. It must be great to work for them in in…

Generally I'd agree, but you must not have seen their attempts at live events :(.

Re: How Netflix Accurately Attributes eBPF Flow Logs

#22

Post by DadBase »

thewisenerd wrote: post #10

so they didn't want to pay for AWS CloudWatch [1]; decided to roll their in-house network flow log collection; and had to re-implement attribution? i wonder how many hundreds of thousands of dollars network flow logs cost them; obviously at some point it is going to be cheaper to re-implement monitoring in-house. [1]: https://youtu.be/8C9xNVYbCVk?feature=shared&t=1685

I recall a time when we managed network flows by manually parsing /proc/net/tcp and correlating PIDs with netstat outputs. eBPF? Sounds like a fancy way to avoid good old-fashioned elbow grease.

Re: How Netflix Accurately Attributes eBPF Flow Logs

#23

Post by slt2021 »

Question to the Netflix folks: I saw a lot of in-house developed tools being quoted, do you guys have service mesh like linkerd ?

Have you guys evaluated vendors like Kentik?

I would love to get more insight into what do you guys actually do with flow logs? for example if I store 1 TB of flow logs, what value can I actually derive from them that justify the cost of collection, processing, and storage.

Re: How Netflix Accurately Attributes eBPF Flow Logs

#24

Post by ZeWaka »

nimbius wrote: post #17

i refuse to believe a company that wasted $320 million dollars on "the electric state" could ever manage to do anything correctly. stripe the parking lot? stock the breakroom? clean the toilets? simply not possible.

Beautiful art and book, but what a unfaithful travesty of a production that absolutely trodded on the original work.

Re: How Netflix Accurately Attributes eBPF Flow Logs

#26

Post by autoexec »

nimbius wrote: post #17

i refuse to believe a company that wasted $320 million dollars on "the electric state" could ever manage to do anything correctly. stripe the parking lot? stock the breakroom? clean the toilets? simply not possible.

Badly managed companies often hire some very good talent which can allow them to sometimes do very impressive things in spite of themselves.

Re: How Netflix Accurately Attributes eBPF Flow Logs

#27

Post by steve_adams_86 »

itishappy wrote: post #20
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like seneca, I also don’t know anyone who uses it. That’s interesting. I haven’t used it for around 2 years. I wonder who uses it when I see their reports, because I don’t know them. I probably have a weird group of friends. I’m sure if I asked, some of my coworkers use it. My kids would love if we used it. Perhaps it’s big among younger people.

Do you use something different? Anecdotally, I find Disney+ to be a major divider. Friends of mine have kids and Disney+ and/or they're still using a decade-old Netflix subscription.

We use Apple TV a small amount (for Silo and Severance most recently), and Disney+ slightly more for the kids. We occasionally use YouTube.

We got a promotion for Disney+ and probably won't renew it. By the time it's over, it seems like there won't be much worth watching left on there. The kids already have a hard time finding anything they're interested in watching.

Re: How Netflix Accurately Attributes eBPF Flow Logs

#28

Post by ciupicri »

yuters wrote: post #12
ASalazarMX wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite their awful UX, I'm always impressed with how reliable their service is, technically speaking. Video is always good and responsive even on less-than-stellar connections, you can leave a show paused for hours, and resume it almost instantly. Their fast.com speed test is always much faster than your regular internet access, I guess thanks to their Open Connect Appliances. It must be great to work for them in in…

I have an old fire tv and never tried to stop automatic updates on it, it has become so slow and unresponsive that I'm barely able to switch inputs to use something else. Netflix is the only app that still works on that tv.

I also have an old TV and guess what? Netflix stopped working last year. The application is not supported anymore. Beats me why.

Re: How Netflix Accurately Attributes eBPF Flow Logs

#29

Post by SoftTalker »

temp0826 wrote: post #6
seneca wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one I know uses Netflix anymore, and I haven't for a while, but from what I've seen their subscriber numbers are actually doing quite well.

I'm not sure I know anyone that _doesn't_ have it

Canceled mine a few months ago as I never used it.

Re: How Netflix Accurately Attributes eBPF Flow Logs

#30

Post by retiredpapaya »

slt2021 wrote: post #23

Question to the Netflix folks: I saw a lot of in-house developed tools being quoted, do you guys have service mesh like linkerd ? Have you guys evaluated vendors like Kentik? I would love to get more insight into what do you guys actually do with flow logs? for example if I store 1 TB of flow logs, what value can I actually derive from them that justify the cost of collection, processing, and storage.

I think Netflix does use an Envoy-based Service Mesh [1], and they roll their own control plane.

https://netflixtechblog.com/zero-configuration-service-mesh-...

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