Netflix’s Success Story: Leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) for Unparalleled Growth
The most complete and widely used cloud platform in the world, Amazon Web Services (AWS), provides over 175 fully functional services from data centers worldwide.
AWS offers a broad set of global computing, storage, database, analytics, application, and deployment services that help organisations move faster, lower IT costs and scale applications.
According to Amazon, AWS has over 1 million active users in 190 countries. Of these users, about 10% are enterprise-scale customers, while the rest are small and medium-sized businesses. AWS is the market leader in cloud computing, with a market share of over 40%.
Here are some other AWS statistics:
- AWS has 5x more deployed cloud infrastructure than its next 14 competitors combined.
- Amazon S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% resiliency and scale to trillions of objects worldwide.
- AWS accounts for 41.5% of the public cloud market, more significant than Microsoft, Google, Rackspace, and IBM combined.
Top 5 AWS Customers by Monthly Spend
Here are the top 5 AWS customers with percentage and monthly spend:
These numbers are based on data from Intricately, a company that tracks cloud computing usage. It is important to note that these numbers are estimates and may only partially be accurate. However, they give us a general idea of which companies spend the most on AWS.
Netflix is the clear leader in AWS spending, with a monthly spend of 19 million USD. This is likely because Netflix is a streaming service requiring much computing power to deliver its content to users worldwide.
AWS Partner Netflix accounts for up to one-third of peak Internet traffic.
Netflix’s Reliance on AWS
Netflix is an American subscription streaming service and production company that offers a wide variety of on-demand television series, movies, anime, documentaries, and more. It is one of the world’s most popular streaming services, with over 222 million subscribers worldwide. More than 100 million members in more than 190 countries enjoy 125 million hours of TV shows and movies daily.
Netflix began using AWS in 2009, and the partnership has been mutually beneficial. AWS has helped Netflix to scale its operations, improve its reliability, and reduce its costs.
Why Netflix and Other Top Companies Use AWS
Here are some of the benefits that Netflix has enjoyed since using AWS:
- Scalability: AWS has helped Netflix to scale its operations to meet the growing demand for its streaming service. Netflix can now easily add new servers and storage capacity without investing in new hardware or software.
- Reliability: AWS has helped Netflix improve its streaming service’s dependability. AWS’s global infrastructure ensures that Netflix’s content is always available to its customers, no matter where they are in the world.
- Cost savings: AWS has helped Netflix to reduce its costs. Netflix can now pay for AWS services on a pay-as-you-go basis, which has helped it to save money on its IT infrastructure.
Right now, Netflix uses AWS for nearly all its computing and storage needs, including databases, analytics, recommendation engines, video transcoding, and more — hundreds of functions that, in total, use more than 100,000 server instances on AWS.
Netflix & Amazon Kinesis Data Streams Case Study
“Amazon Kinesis Data Streams processes multiple terabytes of log data each day, yet events show up in our analytics in seconds. We can discover and respond to issues in real time, ensuring high availability and a great customer experience.”
John Bennett
Senior Software Engineer, Netflix
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams (KDS) is a massively scalable and durable real-time data streaming service. KDS can continuously capture gigabytes of data per second from hundreds of thousands of sources such as website clickstreams, database event streams, financial transactions, social media feeds, IT logs, and location-tracking events. The data collected is available in milliseconds to enable real-time analytics use cases such as dashboards, anomaly detection, dynamic pricing, and more. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams enable real-time processing of streaming data at a massive scale. Kinesis Streams enables the building of custom applications that process or analyse streaming data for specialised needs.
Netflix required a robust solution to handle the ingestion, augmentation, and analysis of several terabytes of data generated daily by its network. This data, in the form of VPC (Virtual Cloud Provider) flow logs, was crucial for enhancing cloud performance and optimising data storage, management, and analysis.
The solution Netflix ultimately deployed — known internally as Dredge — centralises flow logs using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams.
The application reads the data from Amazon Kinesis Data Streams in real-time and enriches IP addresses with application metadata to provide a full picture of the networking environment.
“Usually, we would put the data into a database, which would build an index to enable faster querying,” says Bennett. “Dredge joins the flow logs with application metadata as it streams and indexes it without using a database, which eliminates a lot of the complexity.”
The enriched data lands in an open-source analytics application called Druid.
Netflix uses the OLAP querying functionality to quickly slice data into regions, availability zones, and time windows to visualise it and gain insight into how the network is behaving and performing.
The scalability of Amazon Kinesis Data Streams was a good fit for the Dredge application because of the cyclical and elastic nature of network usage at Netflix.
Netflix has developed the ability to devise novel methods for optimising its applications. This includes tasks like advancing an application from one region to another or switching to a more appropriate network protocol designed for specific types of traffic.
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