How Netflix uses AWS services ? (2024)

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How Netflix uses AWS services ? ›

Netflix relies on AWS to help it innovate with speed and consistently deliver best-in-class entertainment. AWS provides Netflix with compute, storage, and infrastructure that allow the company to scale quickly, operate securely, and meet capacity needs anywhere in the world.

Netflix uses AWS for almost everything cloud computing. That includes online storage, a recommendation engine, video transcoding, databases, and analytics. So most of the $1 billion Netflix plans to spend on cloud services will go into Amazon Cloud Services.

AWS's global infrastructure is a key factor in Netflix's ability to serve its content to viewers across over 190 countries. The cloud provider's extensive network of data centers worldwide means that Netflix can deploy its service in close proximity to its audience, minimizing latency and improving streaming quality.

As it became clear that AWS was unlikely to resolve the issues before Netflix reached peak traffic in the early evening, we decided to manually re-assign our traffic to avoid the problematic zone. Thankfully, Netflix engineering teams were able to quickly coordinate to get this done.

At this point, the team recognised they needed to move away from relational databases in their data centre, away from vertically scaled single points of failure which could be so disruptive to their business. A new approach was necessary, and this led the Netflix team to Amazon Web Services and the AWS Cloud.

Netflix relies on AWS to help it innovate with speed and consistently deliver best-in-class entertainment. AWS provides Netflix with compute, storage, and infrastructure that allow the company to scale quickly, operate securely, and meet capacity needs anywhere in the world.

Unlike its peers, Netflix has made a substantial capital investment to establish its own CDN, consisting of over 17,000 servers strategically spread across 158 countries.

To address these challenges, Netflix made a strategic decision to migrate its infrastructure to the cloud, choosing Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its IaaS provider. AWS offered the scalability, reliability, and performance that Netflix needed to deliver a seamless streaming experience to its users.

Understanding the Cost Factor

Now for the intriguing part — the price tag. With 208 million users streaming 1.5 hours daily, the data influx is staggering. With AWS charging around $0.021 per gigabyte monthly, Netflix's annual AWS bill touches $1 billion. Surprisingly, this accounts for only 4% of its annual revenue.

Would Amazon have survived without AWS? ›

So to give you a direct answer, no Amazon wouldn't be profitable as of now without AWS. it took Amazon more than 14 years—58 quarters after its May 1997 initial public offering—to make, cumulatively, as much profit as it produced in the latest quarter alone.

In August 2008, Netflix experienced major database corruption for three days. This is when Netflix decided to go to Amazon Web Services (AWS), even though Amazon is its biggest competitor. At this time, AWS was just getting established.

3. Netflix. In 2008, Netflix was on the brink of its streaming evolution, coinciding with the economic downturn. Responding to the decline of video rental stores, Netflix introduced streaming as a cost-effective entertainment solution.

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 founders Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph wanted to bring customer-centricity to the video rental market. At the time, renting videos was inconvenient and costly, with customers often plagued by expensive late fees. They created an entirely new way to watch movies and consume content.

AWS outage causes: Internal issues

As AWS describes it, this “triggered an unexpected behavior from a large number of clients inside the internal network”. Basically, AWS unintentionally triggered a Distributed Denial of Service (or DDoS attack) on their own internal network.

AWS helps industry leaders like Netflix, HBO Max, Peaco*ck, Discovery+, HULU, and Prime Video reliably deliver, monetize, and support live and on-demand media over the internet, and bring unparalleled experiences to screens everywhere.

Netflix uses a hybrid cloud. The company uses a private cloud for web hosting, whereas it uses a private cloud to store customers' information, such as payment details, device information, etc. In short, using a hybrid cloud allows Netflix and various other companies to take advantage of both types of clouds.