Completing the Netflix Cloud Migration
Yury Izrailevsky Vice President , Cloud and Platform Engineering at Netflix
After a seven year migration process , Netflix completed its migration to cloud and shut its last data center .
Our journey to the cloud at Netflix began in August of 2008 , when we experienced a major database corruption and for three days could not ship DVDs to our members . That is when we realized that we had to move away from vertically scaled single points of failure , like relational databases in our datacenter , towards highly reliable , horizontally scalable , distributed systems in the cloud . We chose Amazon Web Services ( AWS ) as our cloud provider because it provided us with the greatest scale and the broadest set of services and features . The majority of our systems , including all customer-facing services , had been migrated to the cloud prior to 2015 . Since then , we ’ ve been taking the time necessary to figure out a secure and durable cloud path for our billing infrastructure as well as all aspects of our customer and employee data management . We are happy to report that in early January , 2016 , after seven years of diligent effort , we have finally completed our cloud migration and shut down the last remaining data center bits used by our streaming service !
Moving to the cloud has brought Netflix a number of benefits . We have eight times as many streaming members than we did in 2008 , and they are much more engaged , with overall viewing growing by three orders of magnitude in eight years .
The Netflix product itself has continued to evolve rapidly , incorporating many new resource-hungry features and relying on ever-growing volumes of data . Supporting such rapid growth would have been extremely difficult out of our own data centers ; we simply could not have racked the servers fast enough . Elasticity of the cloud allows us to add thousands of virtual servers and petabytes of storage within minutes , making such an expansion possible . On January 6 , 2016 , Netflix expanded its service to over 130 new countries , becoming a truly global Internet TV network . Leveraging multiple AWS cloud regions , spread all over the world , enables us to dynamically shift around and expand our global infrastructure capacity , creating a better and more enjoyable streaming experience for Netflix members wherever they are .
We rely on the cloud for all of our scalable computing and storage needs — our business logic , distributed databases and big data processing / analytics , recommendations , transcoding , and hundreds of other functions that make up the Netflix application .
Video is delivered through Netflix Open Connect , our content delivery network that is distributed globally to efficiently deliver our bits to members ’ devices .
The cloud also allowed us to significantly increase our service availability . There were a number of outages in our data centers , and while we have hit some inevitable rough patches in the cloud , especially in the earlier days of cloud migration , we saw a steady increase in our overall availability , nearing our desired
28 | THE DOPPLER | WINTER 2017