Case Study of how Netflix got benefits from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

8 min readSep 22, 2020

Hello World! In this article, I am going to talk about an overview of What is AWS? What is Cloud Computing? Types Of Cloud Computing Services? What are the Benefits of Cloud Computing? Benefits of AWS? Case Study of how Netflix got benefits from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

So let's begin with the explanation……………..

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully-featured AWS has significantly more services, and more features within those services, than any other cloud provider–from infrastructure technologies like compute, storage, and databases–to emerging technologies, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, data lakes and analytics, and Internet of Things. This makes it faster, easier, and more cost-effective to move your existing applications to the cloud and build nearly anything you can imagine.

AWS also has the deepest functionality within those services. For example, AWS offers the widest variety of databases that are purpose-built for different types of applications so you can choose the right tool for the job to get the best cost and performance. services from data centers globally. Millions of customers — including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies — are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Organizations of every type, size, and industry are using the cloud for a wide variety of use cases, such as data backup, disaster recovery, email, virtual desktops, software development, and testing, big data analytics, and customer-facing web applications. For example, healthcare companies are using the cloud to develop more personalized treatments for patients. Financial services companies are using the cloud to power real-time fraud detection and prevention. And video game makers are using the cloud to deliver online games to millions of players around the world.

Benefits of AWS

Processes and enriches multiple terabytes each day, representing billions of events, with sub-second response times for analytics queries
Highly cost-efficient compared to competing solutions
Freedom to experiment with system architecture to arrive at the most effective solution
Data ingestion initiated with just a few simple API calls
Highly elastic solution with close to 1,000 Amazon Kinesis shards working in parallel

What are the Benefits of Cloud Computing?

The cloud gives you easy access to a broad range of technologies so that you can innovate faster and build nearly anything that you can imagine. You can quickly spin up resources as you need them–from infrastructure services, such as compute, storage, and databases, to the Internet of Things, machine learning, data lakes and analytics, and much more.

You can deploy technology services in a matter of minutes, and get from idea to implementation several orders of magnitude faster than before. This gives you the freedom to experiment, test new ideas to differentiate customer experiences and transform your business.

Cost savings

The cloud allows you to trade capital expenses (such as data centers and physical servers) for variable expenses, and only pay for IT as you consume it. Plus, the variable expenses are much lower than what you would pay to do it yourself because of the economies of scale.

Deploy globally in minutes

With the cloud, you can expand to new geographic regions and deploy globally in minutes. For example, AWS has infrastructure all over the world, so you can deploy your application in multiple physical locations with just a few clicks. Putting applications in closer proximity to end users reduces latency and improves their experience.

Agility

The cloud gives you easy access to a broad range of technologies so that you can innovate faster and build nearly anything that you can imagine. You can quickly spin up resources as you need them–from infrastructure services, such as compute, storage, and databases, to Internet of Things, machine learning, data lakes and analytics, and much more.

Elasticity

With cloud computing, you don’t have to over-provision resources up front to handle peak levels of business activity in the future. Instead, you provision the amount of resources that you actually need. You can scale these resources up or down to instantly to grow and shrink capacity as your business needs change.

Types Of Cloud Computing Services

The three main types of cloud computing include Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service. Each type of cloud computing provides different levels of control, flexibility, and management so that you can select the right set of services for your needs.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS):

IaaS contains the basic building blocks for cloud IT. It typically provides access to networking features, computers (virtual or on dedicated hardware), and data storage space. IaaS gives you the highest level of flexibility and management control over your IT resources. It is most similar to the existing IT resources with which many IT departments and developers are familiar.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

PaaS removes the need for you to manage underlying infrastructure (usually hardware and operating systems), and allows you to focus on the deployment and management of your applications. This helps you be more efficient as you don’t need to worry about resource procurement, capacity planning, software maintenance, patching, or any of the other undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in running your application.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

SaaS provides you with a complete product that is run and managed by the service provider. In most cases, people referring to SaaS are referring to end-user applications (such as web-based email). With a SaaS offering, you don’t have to think about how the service is maintained or how the underlying infrastructure is managed. You only need to think about how you will use that particular software.

What cloud computing services are available?

Cloud computing services cover a vast range of options now, from the basics of storage, networking, and processing power through to natural language processing and artificial intelligence as well as standard office applications. Pretty much any service that doesn’t require you to be physically close to the computer hardware that you are using can now be delivered via the cloud.

Why Netflix choose Amazon Web Services(AWS). Study of how Netflix got benefits from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Netflix is the world’s leading internet television network, with more than 100 million members in more than 190 countries enjoying 125 million hours of TV shows and movies each day. 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 Uses Close to 1,000 Amazon Kinesis Shards in Parallel to Process Billions of Traffic Flows

2017

Netflix’s Amazon Kinesis Streams-based solution has proven to be highly scalable, each day processing billions of traffic flows. Typically, about 1,000 Amazon Kinesis shards work in parallel to process the data stream. “Amazon Kinesis Streams processes multiple terabytes of log data each day, yet events show up in our analytics in seconds,” says John Bennett, a senior software engineer at Netflix. “We can discover and respond to issues in real-time, ensuring high availability, and great customer experience.”

Have you ever think why Netflix is still using the Amazon AWS Cloud even after Amazon is a competitor of Netflix as Amazon have their Amazon prime video ?

There are so many shows which the users watch it on Netflix,

if Netflix starts constructing its own datacenter, just imagine how many data centers will it require. We can only imagine the cost of building the infrastructure.

Second, for the continuation of the data center, it will also require a prodigious amount of workers. This in turn will also require an enormous amount of money.

Third for the proper running of the data center, it will require skilled professionals. That will also require a huge amount of money.

Last, they will also need backups. For that, they will also have to maintain proper backups for each & every data.

How Netflix Uses AWS Lambda to Build Rule-Based, Self-Managing Infrastructure to Increase Efficiency

2014

Netflix is one of the world’s largest online media streaming providers, delivering almost 7 billion hours of videos to nearly 50 million customers in 60 countries per quarter. The company is planning to use AWS Lambda to build rule-based, self-managing infrastructure, and replace inefficient processes to reduce the rate of errors and save valuable time. Watch Neil Hunt, Netflix’s chief product officer, explain how the company can use event-based triggers to help automate the encoding process of media files, the validation of backup completions and instance deployments at scale, and the monitoring of AWS resources used by the organization.

Why invest in all these?

Instead Netflix can have a deal with AWS & save all of these costs. And more importantly, by having the deal with AWS, Netflix can focus on its core business & leave it to AWS for dealing with this kind of stuff.

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