Netflix Tech Blog

Netflix recently launched here, and I've been unaffected so far. And +1 for the slideshare page. Their techblog is also worth following: http://techblog.netflix.com/

That's a somewhat difficult questions to answer, and it depends on which aspect of EC2 you're interested in. EC2 isn't really a thing for which there are tutorials because EC2 is essentially a server to rent, It's how you use EC2, and there's hardly a standard for that currently. I think the more important thing is to become familiar with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a whole, of which EC2 is only a part. There are some AWS SDK's which I find wildly helpful. Here's the docs for the php sdk http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSSDKforPHP/latest/#i=AmazonEC2 following other people companies who are using AWS can be a great way discover ways of using AWS. Netflix operates a great blog. http://techblog.netflix.com/ If you're interested in in just renting a server, and putting Wordpress on it, there are tutorials for that, and you'll have to deal with setting up a web server, domain name etc... But perhaps you're interested in learning about how build out a scalable protein folding cluster, and the set of challenges will be completely different. AWS only provides the hardware and you must create whatever you wish to implement.

I had asked a similar question on Quora [1] few years back. Here is the summary: - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Engineering?sk=notes - Google: http://google-engtools.blogspot.com/ - Twitter: http://engineering.twitter.com/ - Linkedin: http://engineering.linkedin.com/blog - Dropbox: https://tech.dropbox.com/ - Instagram: http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/ - Netflix: http://techblog.netflix.com/ - Flickr: http://code.flickr.com - Etsy: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/ - Yelp: http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/ - Heroku: https://blog.heroku.com/ - Airbnb: http://nerds.airbnb.com/ - Bitly: http://word.bitly.com/ - Evernote: https://blog.evernote.com/tech/ - Highscalability: http://highscalability.com/ [1] https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-companies-that-have-some-of-the-bes…

A lot more technical information over at Netflix's blog [0]. I'm unsure what to think about VP9 gaining some decent ground. Firstly, it's great that effort is going into more effecient video streaming, considering how difficult to compress and encode quality video can be. However, the chosen standard doesn't seem to be the best on offer. Just sort of Google randomly choosing one [1], and Netflix hedging their bets that others will adopt if they do, so the codec continues to get improved, and they aren't left hanging with the bill if everyone else ignores it. [0] http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/12/more-efficient-mobile-encodes-for.… [1] Not quite, Google developed VP9 themselves.

I am receiving a DNS error when trying to reach the URL C:\Windows\System32>nslookup http://techblog.netflix.com/ 8.8.8.8 Server: google-public-dns-a.google.com Address: 8.8.8.8 * google-public-dns-a.google.com can't find http://techblog.netflix.com/: Non-existent domain

"And then it hit me"... ok, a great story, but you have to wonder what people would do if they didn't just guess the answer. That much slowness may be disk I/O bound, which would show up in the USE method, or even just my Linux performance checklist[1]. It'd also show up by tracing blocking events, even an off-CPU flame graph, but that's overkill. [1] http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/11/linux-performance-analysis-in-60s.…

A few that I follow on a semi-regular basis: https://michaelfeathers.silvrback.com http://highscalability.com http://techblog.netflix.com http://www.natpryce.com https://8thlight.com/blog/ https://www.percona.com/blog/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com http://blog.crisp.se/author/henrikkniberg https://m.signalvnoise.com https://dannorth.net/blog/ https://codeascraft.com

The best example so far regarding fault tolerance. The Netflix Simian Army. Introduce failures constantly! http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/07/netflix-simian-army.html

Netflix - Product Manager - Content Platform - Los Gatos, CA ONSITE VISA We build the world's deepest catalog of data about movies and tv shows. The latest tech blog from our team: http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/03/extracting-image-metadata-at-scale… We're looking for someone cultured in the fine art of being fantastic. Someone that craves a large domain, freedom to have a huge impact, and the responsibility of delivering. Experience with recommendations, merchandising, motion graphics, still images, machine learning and computer vision wouldn't hurt. Things we don't care about - Process. Certifications.

Even lower-powered VR can have a lot of utility. I've heard folks use the Samsung Gear VR for movie watching, where it uses an application to make it seem like you're in a room with a 100+ inch television, and apparently the sense of presence is so great that it's perfect for watching movies while traveling. Here's John Carmack's post on the subject: http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/09/john-carmack-on-developing-netflix…

It's strange, nothing in the hosts file, any ping says it can't find the host http://techblog.netflix.com/, or even anyone of those check ip sites says the same. Asked some work colleagues here and in Ireland and it seems our company is blocking it, I guess through the firewall which unfortunately I can't disable.

A really interesting article from a couple years ago that talks about their tech behind the regional failover can be found here: http://techblog.netflix.com/2013/12/active-active-for-multi-regional.h…

Is it just me or has the Netflix engineering team really been cranking out good stuff as of recent times? I mean holy crap. This thing feels so futuristic just watching it. I can't begin to express how blown away I am. Given how crazy creative the netflix team is, it's not a stretch to imagine their next hackathon. Put this on a big screen and sit in front of it. Throw in a few hazard lights and a siren and music that plays automatically the moment there's a failure and it's a done deal. Side note: If you want to get a better understanding of what you are reading, the inline linked article[1] is a must read Also, I actually thought the pain suit was a real thing for a moment. Well played Netflix. Well played. [1]http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/09/chaos-engineering-upgraded.html

The latter part is because it was a simulated failure using their Chaos Kong (follow their link to Chaos Experiment: http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/09/chaos-engineering-upgraded.html ).

And Esty: https://codeascraft.com/ Netflix: http://techblog.netflix.com/ Facebook: https://code.facebook.com/posts/ Instagram: https://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/ Pinterest: http://engineering.pinterest.com/ These are all excellent blogs to keep up on in your free time.

Similar experience here. I have a few particularly memorable experiences of dealing with the fallout from the September reboots. Although to be truthful this is partly due to the fact we were moving office and I had people jubilantly packing up around me as I worked to keep things afloat. Not wanting a repeat of this we have migrated as many services we can into autoscaling groups, and automated all resource creation with CloudFormation. This was inspired by this excellent Netflix blogpost: http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/10/a-state-of-xen-chaos-monkey-cassan…

During the evening hours, Netflix represents over 35% of all internet traffic in the US. That is an insane demand to be able to service, but they've done extremely well in my opinion. Much of their tech is open-sourced leading to much better practices industry-wide and they're transparent when things go wrong. Here's an example of their preemptive work to deal with the loss of AWS/ELB regions: http://techblog.netflix.com/2013/12/active-active-for-multi-regional.h… An an example of their post-mortem after deploying Node.js with a bad handler: http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/11/nodejs-in-flames.html Is there any other service with a library well over a petabyte in size that delivers multiple terabits/second worldwide to millions of customers with better reliability? Maybe YouTube with the backing of a company worth $300B more than Netflix?

In this case, I would still recommend Cassandra. It can easily handler the data sizes you mention as well as the write rates you imply further down the thread. Cassandra has a nice and simple architecture (every node is identical, no zookeeper roles etc), high write performance and scalability [1], and is fairly robust. My main piece of advice is to get the tables correctly set up. You need to know exactly what queries you want to make and design a table around that query (Cassandra only allows performant queries to be made, unless you go out of your way to set a flag). Whether a query is possible or performant depends on the key of the rows for the table, which may be a composite key. Take a look at the cassandra documentation for more details. 1. http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/11/benchmarking-cassandra-scalability…

You'll want to issue requests concurrently, use timeouts liberally, and implement fallbacks to cached/calculated data in the event that one of the services fails or misbehaves. Those are just a few guiding principles that will help when building a SOA (service-oriented architecture). Netflix has a great blog post on the structure of their platform [1]. They even open-sourced Hystrix [2], the library they use internally. [1] http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/02/fault-tolerance-in-high-volume.htm… [2] https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix

In the cease and desist, the Verizon's lawyers allege that Netflix can't possibly know if the network slow-down is coming from Verizon's network or other parts of the internet. I actually chuckled when I read this -- because after reading Netflix Tech blog (here: http://techblog.netflix.com/ ) and seeing Netflix's open source contributions (here: https://github.com/Netflix) I have a feeling Netflix probably has a LOT of data to back up these assertions.

Later the algorithm was not implemented: http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/04/netflix-recommendations-beyond-5-s…

"Release It!" is a great book. Netflix has also written a bit on this subject. http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/12/making-netflix-api-more-resilient.…

I have interest in video, cloud and scale so http://techblog.netflix.com/

Great article. Also I would like ton mention a point : implementing a "chaos monkey". As Netflix team nails it "We have found that the best defense against major unexpected failures is to fail often." [1] [1] [http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-into-wild.ht…

I think this will be a great product for startups -- everyone wants to build products on top of a dynamic environment, but to really do it, you would need to invest in heavy use of things like using Zookeeper -- but Zookeeper has a very high cost to integrate and maintain. Netflix has released something very similar, Eureka, as open source here: http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/09/eureka.html But the Rackspace Service Registry comes with a SaaS model, more client libraries, and is hopefully easier to integrate. (disclaimer, I work at Rackspace, but not on this product)

Read here: http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/04/netflix-recommendations-beyond-5-s… In parts one and two, it's explained that just about every list generated for users is an up-to-date set of recommendations. You point out yourself that recommendations is one area where caching it's truly viable (at least, not in a traditional sense). I'm definitely not the right person to go into all the details (nor do I think such a discussion would be prudent on HackerNews)--but I wanted to weigh in quickly that there's a lot of stuff served that goes way beyond the notion of a "static" content that's trivially cached.

Los Gatos, CA - Netflix My team at Netflix is looking for Site Reliability Engineers to come in and help solve our availability and reliability challenges. We have one of the largest AWS footprints out there and are constantly finding out about the limits of AWS technologies. We have a unique problem that we want to figure out how to enable all of our engineering teams to deploy faster and more often, while still increasing the overall availability of the Netflix streaming service. We do this by building tools/services for engineering teams and by helping teams figure out ways to make their software more reliable. Official Job Description: http://jobs.netflix.com/jobsListing.html?id=oHxbWfw5 To get a sense of what engineering teams at Netflix work on: http://techblog.netflix.com/ https://github.com/netflix If interested, please feel free to email me directly (email in profile)

This is blatant blogspam. Go read the Netflix page at http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/04/netflix-recommendations-beyond-5-s… instead, discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3810058.

They put in great engineering effort to ensure high availability despite random instance failures. I really like their Chaos Monkey. See: http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/5-lessons-weve-learned-using-aws.h…

This came up in the first entry. Netflix would apparently dispute your take on their core competency. http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/four-reasons-we-choose-amazons-clo… The problems [Amazon] are trying to solve are incredibly difficult ones, but they aren’t specific to our business. Every successful internet company has to figure out great storage solutions, hardware failover, networking infrastructure, etc. Their third argument for virtualized infrastructure was "We're not very good at predicting customer growth or device engagement", which strikes me as a compelling problem to solve. Having to change their approach to managing service dependencies and failures doesn't seem like too high a price to pay.