NETFLIX’S CLOUD MIGRATION

Ariel Tseitlin Partner, Scale Venture Partners July 10, 2016

It all started in 2008…

A TALE OF A CLOUD TRANSFORMATION

ABOUT NETFLIX Netflix is the world’s leading Internet television network with over 81 million members in more than 190 countries enjoying more than 125 million hours of TV shows and movies per day, including original series[1]

[1] http://ir.netflix.com/

A TROUBLED STATE OF AFFAIRS •  Single monolithic Java app

•  2 Data Centers, running 100% of production and test

•  Centralized release process, train left every two weeks

•  6-8 weeks to provision new hardware

THE DAY THE SHELL CRACKED •  Oracle database corruption rendered site unavailable

•  It took 3 days to recover

•  Unable to ship any DVDs during downtime

A JOURNEY TO THE SKY •  Combined cloud migration with micro-services re-architecture

•  Started small, tunneling back to data center

•  Shifted more and more services to cloud over time

•  A difficult period of “roman-riding”

•  2010 iPhone launch done entirely from the cloud

CORPORATE SYSTEMS TOO

It wasn’t just the Product

CORPORATE SYSTEM MOVED TO SAAS •  Email (Exchange->Google Apps)

•  Expense Management (Concur->Workday)

•  Document sharing (File Servers->Box)

•  And many more…

•  Goal: 100% SaaS, no data centers

MADE POSSIBLE IN THE CLOUD

Agility, APIs, Elasticity, Efficiency, Resiliency

AGILITY •  Removed separation between dev and ops

•  Resources at the click of a button

•  Decentralized continuous delivery

APIS •  Software-controlled infrastructure (start, terminate, scale)

•  Inject failure

•  Monitor & audit

•  Automate operations

ELASTICITY •  Capacity planning replaced with forecasting

•  Dynamic load-based auto-scaling

•  New data centers at the click of a button

EFFICIENCY •  ~10x trough to peak ratio. •  Optimize machine class for each service

•  Highly available red/black deployments

RESILIENCY •  Failure injection

•  Redundancy (multiple AZs, multiple regions)

•  Automated remediation

•  Decentralized operations

•  Improved performance and reliability

ORGANIZATION HAD TO CHANGE •  BEFORE: Centralized NOC & IT Ops reporting to CIO •  AFTER: Centralized platform, reporting to CPO, with service teams

for •  Performance •  Availability •  Security •  Delivery

SPECIAL CASE OR A BLUEPRINT FOR SUCCESS? •  Was there anything unique about Netflix that enabled it to make the

cloud & DevOps transformation? YES & NO •  No, any organization / enterprise can (& will) transform itself to

become cloud-native •  Yes, you need the right culture, talent, and desire (but you will be

out-competed if you don’t!)