The Story of the Migration of Netflix’s IT Resources to Cloud
At first, Netflix had colocation deployment, working with IBM as a hardware server, and with Oracle as a database server. In 2008, the company faced with a hardware failure, and this cost them two days. Then, they started thinking to migrate some parts of their IT infrastructure to cloud since it would be cheaper if there were accident like before. In addition to cost, speed was another problem in a case that Netflix users could consume the contents less. They were waiting to watch some DVD because data center was not so quick. That meant Netflix would either expand their IT team and expect them to guess the customers’ needs technically or they would give the job to someone who had been experienced about those needs before and expand their content archive.
Therefore, they decided moving to cloud environment in order to fix not only this problem but also the scalability in case some users list or watch so many movies in a short period. Firstly, they had started with their front-end panels in 2010 by working with AWS. One year later, they continued with their back end works and databases.
As a short, Netflix migrated their traditional IT infrastructure to cloud because they aim to focus on what they really want to do as a company in an agile way. Dave Hahn, Sr. SRE in Cloud Operations & Reliability Engineering at Netflix, stated that they could not grow as much as they have recently done if they did not adapt their work to cloud. He also emphasized that AWS took responsibility of all the IT hard work from Netflix, and this shows why Amazon is the right partner as cloud server, he said.
After the COVID pandemic started to show its effect globally in terms of the increase the number of sick people and home confinement, people had a chance to have more spare time on hobbies. Netflix had grown during that time, 1st quarter of 2020, both with the increase in content consumption by Netflix users and with the increase in the number of paid memberships. The company focused on service quality such as adding new features to the platform and customer support which can be managed remotely rather than creating any product. They even recruited 2,000 employees for customer support at that time.
Afterwards, Netflix could not grow during the pandemic, and could not be successful as they are now if they could not manage their job remotely. This happened thanks to important part of their system such as AWS and Open Connect for sure.
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