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In 2019, Netflix, a video streaming app, consumed 15% of the Internet’s bandwidth, all across the world.
With a record 213 million paid subscribers, who spend an average of 3.2 hours per day watching movies and web series, Netflix is the world’s #1 on-demand streaming service. With over 6 billion hours of collective viewership per day, 5000 movies, and 50,000+ episodes being watched every 24 hours, Netflix has set new benchmarks in scalability and availability of video streaming, never seen or heard before.
They have stunned the world with their technical capabilities of managing such a huge user base and providing them uninterrupted video streaming experience with almost zero points of failure.
A technological marvel, an unprecedented case of designing a system architecture that refuses to fail.
In this blog series, we will decode the technological capabilities of Netflix at the backend, which ensures such an awesome level of service, and find out why Netflix is able to deliver an amazing experience, day after day, week after week, year after year.
In the first part, we will understand the system design of its architecture: The backbone of Netflix’s world-class streaming services.
In the second part, we will understand the various components of this design architecture, and in the concluding part, we will decode the system, with respect to the architecture and design of the architecture.
Let’s start!
Although Netflix was launched in 1997, as a DVD rental startup, it took 8 years to realize the power of the Cloud. In 2008, due to the heavy demand for DVDs, they had to shut down their in-house data center, and business operations for 3-4 days, and this forced them to embrace a scalable, robust data infrastructure management.
And then everything changed.
Since then, they have wholeheartedly adopted AWS or Amazon Web Services for managing their IT infrastructure, and they replaced their existing monolithic programs hosted on their own data servers with microservices architecture, hosted on public cloud.
Due to their decision to embrace microservices-based architecture powered by public cloud from AWS, they were able to ensure zero point of failure and an extremely scalable IT infrastructure to support millions of service requests, without any hiccup.
In the microservices-based architecture that Netflix deployed, larger software programs are broken down into smaller programs, or components, based on modularity, and every such component has its own data encapsulation.
Due to this reason, Netflix is able to scale its services rapidly, via horizontal scaling and workload partitioning as part of the microservices-based architecture.
In case any smaller software program is not working or slowing down the system requests, then the engineers can quickly isolate that component, and ensure uninterrupted service. Tracking of every individual software component is also possible, with microservices-based architecture.
As per available reports, and blogs by renowned architecture experts, Netflix’s system architecture has two main components:
Both of these components should work concurrently, and in sync to ensure timely delivery of content and streaming services.
If we talk about software architecture, then the three most critical components of Netflix are: Client, Backend, and Content Delivery Network (CDN).
While Client can be any supported browser where Netflix can be accessed or their own mobile app; Backend comprises AWS-based services, databases, storage, which handles everything besides streaming videos.
Some critical part of Netflix’ backend comprises of:
And finally, the Open Connect CDN, which is a powerful network of servers, that are deployed for streaming and storing videos on a mass scale.
These servers are called Open Connect Appliances (OCAs), and they are optimized for seamless performance via fast streaming of videos, and fast retrieval of these videos, based on the service requests.
So, what exactly happens when a user clicks or taps on the playback button?
Here is the diagram that details the exact video playback process, when a user clicks or taps on the playback button to stream a video:
A chain of events is triggered this way after the playback button is activated:
And all these steps happen within less than 1 second.
As shared earlier, the backend comprises services, databases, storage, and everything else besides the actual streaming process, which is handled by Playback apps.
Here too, microservices-based architecture is deployed for handling backend activities that include: user management, billing, subscription management, video transcoding, personalized recommendations to the users, and more.
Here is the possible backend architecture of Netflix, based on the available reports and blogs shared by experts in this domain:
Now, this is what happens during a typical service request placed for the backend architecture:
This is how Netflix system architecture works, serves the requests made by clients and delivers a powerful performance.
In the next part, we will decode the components of Netflix architecture and more.
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