A Design Analysis of Cloud-based Microservices Architecture at Netflix

A comprehensive system design analysis of microservices architecture at Netflix to power its global video streaming services

1. Introduction

Netflix has been among the best online subscription-based video streaming services in the world ([12]) for many years, accounting for over 15% of the world’s Internet bandwidth capacity. In 2019, Netflix already acquired over 167 million subscribers, with more than 5 million new subscribers added every quarter, and operates in more than 200 countries. More specifically, Netflix’s subscribers spend over 165 million hours of watching over 4,000 films and 47,000 episodes daily. These impressive statistics show us, from an engineering perspective point of view, Netflix technical teams have designed such an amazing video streaming system with very high availability and scalability in order to serve their customers globally.

However, it took the technical teams over 8 years to have their IT systems as now ([1]). In fact, the infrastructure transformation at Netflix began in August 2008 after a service outage in its own data centers shutting the entire DVD renting services down for three days. Netflix realized that it needs a more reliable infrastructure with no single point of failure. Therefore, it has made two important decisions: migrating the IT infrastructure from its data centers to a public cloud and replacing…