remember blockbuster
you can laugh but there wasn't quite anything like popping over to one of the
9 000 locations they had globally renting
a gently used copy of home alone on vhs
and settling down in the glow of your crt tube television with a big bucket of
popcorn of course once the internet came along
and netflix with it blockbuster stores became all but a memory as there are now
only a dozen of them left in the united states mostly in alaska due to
outrageous broadband prices so intuitively you'd think that it would
take a rather massive enterprise to pull
the rug out from under literally thousands of brick and mortar stores
and you'd be right during periods of peak usage
netflix accounts for over a third of all
downstream internet traffic in the united states a third
but exactly how do they fling videos to
so many people at once do they just have one giant server farm that constantly
pours episodes of house of cards and family guy onto the internet backbone
not exactly like many other large sites focused on
media delivery netflix uses a content
delivery network or cdn to store and
transmit movies and tv shows you see
although netflix's entire library could certainly fit on a few servers housed in
a single building there are some problems with this approach
one locations far from that facility
would suffer from high latency not what you want for streaming video
two this architecture would be basically the
definition of a bottleneck since a single connection that fast doesn't
exist and if it did it would be astronomically expensive
and three it would mean a single point
of failure that could cause netflix's entire service to go down if something
happened at that one location a cdn
solves these problems by utilizing redundant servers in multiple locations
to serve many geographic areas more quickly to balance server load between
them so they don't get overworked and to ensure that there will be backups in
case of an incident or outage at one or
even several locations but netflix in particular takes this
concept a step further because they are so
big they actually work directly with a number of isps to install their own
hardware these boxes called open connect appliances at
either exchange points or even within the isp's facilities themselves
holding up to 280 terabytes of video each
these come pre-loaded with close to the entire netflix library so what this
means for you the consumer is that instead of connecting to some super far
away land server to watch a movie you're connecting to an appliance at your own
isp that's much closer cutting down on
latency and making it so that your netflix data packets don't have to fight
with all the other internet traffic that is upstream from your isp
and when it's time for catalog updates netflix pushes them to these appliances
during the morning when there's typically less internet traffic overall
meaning that by the time everyone gets home from work ready for a night of
binge watching the repository of content
at their isp has already been updated and is ready to go and if lots of people
fire up their computers at once the appliances are equipped to push out data
at over 90 gigabits per second the
equivalent of over 13 000 people
watching an hd movie at once
then if that's not enough bandwidth netflix can just install more boxes for
larger isps that serve greater numbers of people but to keep speeds high the
open connect boxes only handle storing and transmitting video for everything
else keeping track of what shows you like recommendations billing logins and
the search feature netflix uses amazon web services or aws a massive cloud
processing service that netflix can quickly buy more time on in the form of
virtualized servers as their customer base and traffic volume grows and it's
also very failure tolerant due to high amounts of redundancy
but wait a second amazon has that prime video thing that
they're trying to get everyone to buy why in the world would they let netflix
a huge competitor use their servers
well amazon does make quite a bit of money from their deal with netflix
possibly into the range of hundreds of millions of dollars and may not want to
start pushing out certain customers just because they might compete in a
different market segment i mean think of how samsung manufacturers chips that
apple puts in their phones
because if amazon wants to be the go-to company for cloud processing they can't
behave in that way it's kind of like how comcast won't stop you from watching a
disney movie through their internet service yet
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