Streaming video giant Netflix announced this week that they have finally completed its full cloud migration, shutting down its final data center in the process. The long-awaited conclusion to the process comes several months late: Netflix had originally announced, last August, they would shut down its final data center by the end of the summer, moving everything to the public cloud soon after.
“We realized that we had to move away from vertically scaled single points of failure, like relational databases in our datacenter,” comments Netflix Vice President of Cloud and Platform Engineering, Yury Izrailevsky, who marks that they needed to make the move towards “highly reliable, horizontally scalable, distributed systems in the cloud.”
Izrailevsky also reminds that this migratory process took Netflix the whole of seven years to complete took the company a full seven years to complete because the company had elected a cloud-native approach, which involved the virtual rebuilding of all the company’s technology, as well as, “fundamentally changing the way we operate the company,” as he tells.
Making the choice to move to a public cloud server, then, Netflix then had to choose which infrastructure they wanted to use to house their data. Naturally, they selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) because, as the company explains, it provided them with “the greatest scale and the broadest set of services and features.”
He adds, “All the search, personalization, all the business logic, all the data processing that enables the streaming experience, the 100 different applications and services that make up the streaming application, they live in AWS.”
Furthermore, Izrailevsky shares that this move has already greatly benefited Netflix. For one, it immediately increased membership eight-fold. This is only one of many benefits and potential benefits that Netflix already anticipates, which could indicate that this might be a move more companies investigate in the near future.
