Netflix announced that it has finally completed shifting all of its IT functions to Amazon Web Services.
The company said it was able to shut down the last remaining bits of the data center used for its streaming service and had finally accomplished every aspect of its cloud migration as of January.
Netflix started migrating its services to the cloud in 2008 and had since then relied on the cloud for all of its needs in storage and scalable computing. These include the company's business logic, transcoding, recommendations, big data processing or analytics, distributed databases and hundreds more of varied functions involved in the service's application.
"The majority of our systems, including all customer-facing services, had been migrated to the cloud prior to 2015," says Yury Izrailevsky, vice president of Cloud and Platform Engineering. "Since then, we've been taking the time necessary to figure out a secure and durable cloud path for our billing infrastructure as well as all aspects of our customer and employee data management."
Netflix says that it decided to migrate following a major database corruption on its system that had affected its DVD shipment operations. For three days, the company found itself unable to ship DVDs to its members.
At that point, Netflix realized the need to deviate towards a cloud system that is more reliable, horizontally scalable and with great distribution.
"We chose Amazon Web Services as our cloud provider because it provided us with the greatest scale and the broadest set of services and features," added Izrailevsky.
Amazon has a cloud network that spans 12 regions globally. Each region has its own availability zones made up of one or more data centers.
Netflix's data centers operate in the regions of Oregon, Northern Virginia and Dublin. When asked about addressing an instance if a whole region goes down, Netflix said it will simply redirect the traffic to the other regions that are available.
Netflix said that its cloud migration initiative had so far brought several benefits. These include the increase in the number of its streaming members by up to eight times. With that, overall viewing has grown massively with more engagement seen among members.
Another benefit is the ability to add several thousands of virtual servers and storage petabytes in minutes thanks to the cloud's elasticity. The company's global expansion to more than 130 new countries will benefit too, as well as the capacity to increase its service availability at a significant level.
Lastly, with the data migration, the company can reap advantages from the economies of scale that can only be achieved in a large cloud ecosystem.
