Making the Netflix API More Resilient

by Ben SchmausThe API brokers catalog and subscriber metadata between internal services and Netflix applications on hundreds of device types. If any of these internal services fail there is a risk that the failure could propagate to the API and break the user experience for...

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Introducing Curator - The Netflix ZooKeeper Library

By Jordan ZimmermanOpen Source at NetflixWe are committed to Open Source Software at Netflix. We've blogged about it in the past. Today we are announcing a portal for open source projects from Netflix. The portal is currently hosted on Github. There are several projects in the pipeline (including Curator which we're announcing today):Curator - The...

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Benchmarking Cassandra Scalability on AWS - Over a million writes per second

by Adrian Cockcroft and Denis SheahanNetflix has been rolling out the Apache Cassandra NoSQL data store for production use over the last six months. As part of our benchmarking we recently decided to run a test designed to validate our tooling and automation scalability as well...

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Netflix Performance on Top Networks

Hi, it’s Ken Florance, Director of Content Delivery for Netflix, with an updated “Netflix Performance on Top Networks” chart.As promised, we’ve been able to separate AT&T and Verizon FTTx offerings from their DSL offerings. The chart now gives a fairly complete look at performance...

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Netflix WebKit-Based UI for TV Devices

This is Matt McCarthy and Kim Trott, device UI engineering managers at Netflix. Our teams use WebKit, JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3 to build user interfaces that are delivered to millions of Netflix customers on game consoles, Blu-ray players, and Internet-connected TVs.We recently spoke at OSCON 2011 about how Netflix develops these user interfaces....

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Building with Legos

In the six years that I have been involved in building and releasing software here at Netflix, the process has evolved and improved significantly. When I started, we would build a WAR, get it setup and tested on a production...

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The Netflix Simian Army

We’ve talked a bit in the past about our move to the cloud and John shared some of our lessons learned in going through that transition in a previous post. Recently, we’ve been focusing on ways to improve availability and reliability and wanted to share some of our progress and thinking. The cloud is all about redundancy and fault-tolerance. Since...

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Upcoming Changes to the Open API Program

This is Daniel Jacobson, director of engineering, with a message to everyone in the Netflix Open API community.We’re making some changes to the Open API program to support the Netflix focus on international streaming. Later this year, we will discontinue support for DVD-related features, degrading them through redirects or other means gracefully whenever...

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Netflix Performance on Top ISP Networks

Hello all, it's Ken Florance, Director of Content Delivery for Netflix. As you can see, we've updated our "Netflix Performance on Top Networks" chart showing performance on Top ISPs over the last several months.We first published similar data in January and we were pleased with...

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Lessons Netflix Learned from the AWS Outage

On Thursday, April 21st, Amazon experienced a large outage in AWS US-East which they describe here. This outage was highly publicized because it took down or severely hampered a number of popular websites that depend on AWS for hosting. Our post below describes our experience at Netflix with the outage, and what we've learned from it.Some BackgroundWhy...

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“More Like This…” Building a network of similarity

Ever wondered what makes “Inception” similar to “12 Monkeys”?Looking at similarity between movies and TV shows is a useful way to find great titles to watch. At Netflix, we calculate levels of similarity between each movie and TV show and use these “similars”, as we call them,...

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NoSQL @ Netflix Talk (Part 1)

A few weeks ago, I gave the first in a series of planned talks on the topic of NoSQL @ Netflix. By now, it is widely known that Netflix has achieved something remarkable over the past 2 years – accelerated subscriber growth with an ever-improving streaming experience. In addition to streaming more titles to more devices in both the US and Canada, Netflix...

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Cloud Connect Keynote : Complexity and Freedom

Netflix In The Clouds View more presentations from Kevin McEntee On March 8th, 2011, I was fortunate to be able to deliver 10 minutes of the keynote address for the Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara, California. Here are some of the points I made during the talk.AvailabilityWe started this cloud re-architecture effort in 2008 in the...

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