Netflix Now Operates 100% in the Cloud
Several months ago, CloudWedge featured a story involving Netflix’s transition to public cloud.
That story, entitled Netflix will be 100% Cloud by 2015, predicted that Netflix would operate exclusively within the AWS data center ecosystem.
Netflix may be a few months behind on their transition, but nonetheless, Netflix has just announced that it has completed its move of 100% of its computing resources into the public cloud.
The move was confirmed by a blog post on the Netflix website.
Yury Izrailevsky, the VP of Cloud Platform Engineering at Netflix writes:
“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.”
Yury Izrailevsky goes on to say, “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.”
It’s widely speculated that Netflix made the decision to go 100% cloud back in 2008.
During August of that year, Netflix suffered a database corruption issue which nearly crippled the video streaming service. Once that issue was resolved, Netflix decided that it would begin putting its operations into the cloud in order to mitigate against the same types of issues.
Netflix’s decision to go 100% cloud may have helped the business achieve international distribution. Since 2008, Netflix’s streaming customers have risen 8 fold, while Netflix as a company has begun shifting its business model into original content, not just content distribution.
Because of cloud, Netflix can be enjoyed in over 130 countries all around the world.
Netflix’s global reach may not have been possible without the cloud and original series such as Fuller House, Flaked, Black is the New Orange may have never come to fruition if Netflix hadn’t made the bold move to go 100% cloud several years ago.
