How Does Netflix Work?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
1,052 words · ~5 min read
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remember blockbuster
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you can laugh but there wasn't quite anything like popping over to one of the
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9 000 locations they had globally renting
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a gently used copy of home alone on vhs
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and settling down in the glow of your crt tube television with a big bucket of
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popcorn of course once the internet came along
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and netflix with it blockbuster stores became all but a memory as there are now
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only a dozen of them left in the united states mostly in alaska due to
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outrageous broadband prices so intuitively you'd think that it would
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take a rather massive enterprise to pull
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the rug out from under literally thousands of brick and mortar stores
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and you'd be right during periods of peak usage
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netflix accounts for over a third of all
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downstream internet traffic in the united states a third
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but exactly how do they fling videos to
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so many people at once do they just have one giant server farm that constantly
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pours episodes of house of cards and family guy onto the internet backbone
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not exactly like many other large sites focused on
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media delivery netflix uses a content
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delivery network or cdn to store and
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transmit movies and tv shows you see
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although netflix's entire library could certainly fit on a few servers housed in
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a single building there are some problems with this approach
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one locations far from that facility
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would suffer from high latency not what you want for streaming video
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two this architecture would be basically the
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definition of a bottleneck since a single connection that fast doesn't
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exist and if it did it would be astronomically expensive
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and three it would mean a single point
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of failure that could cause netflix's entire service to go down if something
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happened at that one location a cdn
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solves these problems by utilizing redundant servers in multiple locations
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to serve many geographic areas more quickly to balance server load between
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them so they don't get overworked and to ensure that there will be backups in
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case of an incident or outage at one or
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even several locations but netflix in particular takes this
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concept a step further because they are so
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big they actually work directly with a number of isps to install their own
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hardware these boxes called open connect appliances at
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either exchange points or even within the isp's facilities themselves
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holding up to 280 terabytes of video each
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these come pre-loaded with close to the entire netflix library so what this
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means for you the consumer is that instead of connecting to some super far
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away land server to watch a movie you're connecting to an appliance at your own
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isp that's much closer cutting down on
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latency and making it so that your netflix data packets don't have to fight
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with all the other internet traffic that is upstream from your isp
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and when it's time for catalog updates netflix pushes them to these appliances
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during the morning when there's typically less internet traffic overall
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meaning that by the time everyone gets home from work ready for a night of
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binge watching the repository of content
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at their isp has already been updated and is ready to go and if lots of people
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fire up their computers at once the appliances are equipped to push out data
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at over 90 gigabits per second the
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equivalent of over 13 000 people
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watching an hd movie at once
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then if that's not enough bandwidth netflix can just install more boxes for
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larger isps that serve greater numbers of people but to keep speeds high the
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open connect boxes only handle storing and transmitting video for everything
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else keeping track of what shows you like recommendations billing logins and
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the search feature netflix uses amazon web services or aws a massive cloud
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processing service that netflix can quickly buy more time on in the form of
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virtualized servers as their customer base and traffic volume grows and it's
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also very failure tolerant due to high amounts of redundancy
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but wait a second amazon has that prime video thing that
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they're trying to get everyone to buy why in the world would they let netflix
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a huge competitor use their servers
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well amazon does make quite a bit of money from their deal with netflix
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possibly into the range of hundreds of millions of dollars and may not want to
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start pushing out certain customers just because they might compete in a
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different market segment i mean think of how samsung manufacturers chips that
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apple puts in their phones
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because if amazon wants to be the go-to company for cloud processing they can't
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behave in that way it's kind of like how comcast won't stop you from watching a
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disney movie through their internet service yet
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