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Cloud Efficiency at Netflix

netflixtechblog.com

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Re: Cloud Efficiency at Netflix

#41

Post by mhh__ »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #15

> One crucial way in which we do this is through the democratization of highly curated data sources that sunshine usage and cost patterns across Netflix’s services and teams. No engineer has ever said this. I miss when engineering blogs were actual engineering. This blog post has been through so much management waffle rewording it no longer adds much to the conversation.

Does it perhaps mean in business speak: "We're now in the third phase of growth, we needed to make the engineers spend less on servers"?

Re: Cloud Efficiency at Netflix

#42

Post by diab0lic »

tlarkworthy wrote: post #25
philipwhiuk wrote: post #15

> One crucial way in which we do this is through the democratization of highly curated data sources that sunshine usage and cost patterns across Netflix’s services and teams. No engineer has ever said this. I miss when engineering blogs were actual engineering. This blog post has been through so much management waffle rewording it no longer adds much to the conversation.

I was excited when I read the title but after reading I am at a loss to understand how Netflix is solving the problem. Centralised cost dashboards??!? How do they solve it on AWS? Tags, Accounts, something else? Why can't they use cost explorer?

Once you hit a certain scale anything on the AWS console becomes impossible to use. It’s one of the reasons most high to very high scale companies use something else to manage cloud resources. See: Spinnaker and Asgard for Netflix specific examples, but also Terraform and the many alternatives.

Re: Cloud Efficiency at Netflix

#43

Post by notepad0x90 »

What happened to netflix? their quality (streaming) is so poor. Out of all the video streaming sources I use (including random shady sites, youtube,vimeo, amazon prime,etc...) theirs has the worst experience. Despite paying for the costliest plan, if their webapp detects any dropped frames or performance issues, it keeps downgrading the video quality until I can't even make out what I'm looking at. Why not buffer or do whatever amazon is doing? I have to actually turn off hardware graphics acceleration in Chrome to stream at all. They used to be the leader in this space, I can't imagine any excuse at all, because their direct competitors are doing much better than them in terms of pure engineering quality. I assure you, I lack nothing in terms of hardware specs or internet speed either, I'm also a US customer.

Sorry for dropping in my personal rant, but it sort of triggered me after looking at the quality of this post. I'm thinking, perhaps they have a culture problem where the focus is "efficiency" as the title implies instead of quality.

Re: Cloud Efficiency at Netflix

#44

Post by computerfriend »

diab0lic wrote: post #42
tlarkworthy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was excited when I read the title but after reading I am at a loss to understand how Netflix is solving the problem. Centralised cost dashboards??!? How do they solve it on AWS? Tags, Accounts, something else? Why can't they use cost explorer?

Once you hit a certain scale anything on the AWS console becomes impossible to use. It’s one of the reasons most high to very high scale companies use something else to manage cloud resources. See: Spinnaker and Asgard for Netflix specific examples, but also Terraform and the many alternatives.

I work for an organisation that is at this scale on AWS. Of course, we use Terraform, but the cost explorer and tags and so on are still usable (and useful).

Re: Cloud Efficiency at Netflix

#45

Post by IsTom »

captn3m0 wrote: post #14
mentalgear wrote: post #2

Maybe not directly related, but I dislike how Netflix obviously provides only 1080p HD on desktop-computer playback, while full 4k on TVs. Has anyone found an easy hack to ensure playback happens in 4k on desktop as well (e.g. url parameter)?

Even worse is Amazon Prime, which doesn't even provide 1080 on Linux systems, even with Widevine.

When I tried to watch some of their original shows I got blurry mess that looked about 360p. It was unwatchable. Tried to mess with widevine to no avail, so I'm no longer their customer. There's enough shows to watch elsewhere these days.

Re: Cloud Efficiency at Netflix

#46

Post by jiggawatts »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #43

What happened to netflix? their quality (streaming) is so poor. Out of all the video streaming sources I use (including random shady sites, youtube,vimeo, amazon prime,etc...) theirs has the worst experience. Despite paying for the costliest plan, if their webapp detects any dropped frames or performance issues, it keeps downgrading the video quality until I can't even make out what I'm looking at. Why not buffer or…

Every year this kind of thing comes up about Netflix, I like to remind the Silicon Valley crowd that for all their billions invested, despite their thousands of highly compensated "engineers" and "data scientists" or whatever they're calling themselves now... NetFlix still hasn't figured out how to deliver subtitles in more than five languages to any particular region of the world.

They provide a service which at its core is just: audio, video, and text. They fail at one of three.

This apparently doesn't warrant a blog, or any attention at all for a decade now.

It's their core service!

Meh... not exciting enough. Rearranging stuff in their cloud however got someone promoted.

Re: Cloud Efficiency at Netflix

#47

Post by diab0lic »

computerfriend wrote: post #44
diab0lic wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you hit a certain scale anything on the AWS console becomes impossible to use. It’s one of the reasons most high to very high scale companies use something else to manage cloud resources. See: Spinnaker and Asgard for Netflix specific examples, but also Terraform and the many alternatives.

I work for an organisation that is at this scale on AWS. Of course, we use Terraform, but the cost explorer and tags and so on are still usable (and useful).

That’s fair, I should have caveated this statement with the fact that I don’t know much about using the modern AWS console.

There are likely a few factors at play here, including the fact that Netflix decided to go its own way in this regard ~15y ago.

Though I work at a smaller (but still large), newer company now we still also have our own stuff for this.

Re: Cloud Efficiency at Netflix

#48

Post by [deleted] »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #15

> One crucial way in which we do this is through the democratization of highly curated data sources that sunshine usage and cost patterns across Netflix’s services and teams. No engineer has ever said this. I miss when engineering blogs were actual engineering. This blog post has been through so much management waffle rewording it no longer adds much to the conversation.

[deleted]
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