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Netflix System Design- Backend Architecture

Elegberun Olugbenga on June 24, 2021

Cover Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash Netflix accounts for about 15% of the world's internet bandwidth traffic, serving over 6 billion hours...
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codingjlu profile image
codingjlu

Thank you so much for sharing! I'm wondering, where do you get all this data from?

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gbengelebs profile image
Elegberun Olugbenga

You're welcome. Its mostly from Netflix's engineering blog

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couchcamote profile image
couchcamote

Thanks for this compilation. I was looking before for one page "summary" of Netflix's architecture. I was reading from different sources and had not enough time or patience of doing it like this.

It would also be cool to have a some sort of something like this for Netflix's resiliency designs and tools like Chaos Monkey. But maybe leave it to someone else who has time.

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gbengelebs profile image
Elegberun Olugbenga

Thank you for your feedback couchcamote, Chaos monkey deserves its own seperate article but I think I'd leave it for someone else 😅

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Pablo Díaz

How do they test their work? they have a dev environment?

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Dino16m

I'm interested in knowing this as well. The system has so many moving parts.

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gbengelebs profile image
Elegberun Olugbenga

Netflix practices something called Chaos Engineering.
You can check out this video for more info.
youtu.be/3WRVgC8SiGc

“Chaos engineering…is the discipline of experimenting on production to find vulnerabilities in the system before they render it unusable for your customers. We do this at Netflix through a tool that we call ChAP…[It] can catch vulnerabilities, and allows users to inject failures into services and prod that validate their assumptions about those services before they become full-blown outages.”

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gbengelebs profile image
Elegberun Olugbenga

Yeah, I guess they have they also carry out tests in production. Check out this video.
youtu.be/3WRVgC8SiGc

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Sansa Mason

Great to know about the complete working architecture of Netflix with end to end strategies applied for it. Its really a special treat for the business peoples to know about Netflix. Try to update How does Netflix make money over here, It will add some additional information in this sections. Thanks.

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Ahsan Mangal 👨🏻‍💻

I learned a lot from reading it. However, I wish the post had more details on some topics, such as how Netflix handles failures and redundancy, how Netflix optimizes video quality for different devices and bandwidths, and how Netflix uses AWS and Open Connect clouds. It would also be helpful if the post had some references or sources for the information presented. Overall, a good introduction to Netflix’s backend architecture.

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morpheus04 profile image
morpheus04

fantastic article. totally enjoyed the read! learnt a new thing too - "Not everyone sees the same image." wow really didn't realize that but now I do

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Elegberun Olugbenga

Thank you morpheus. Glad you enjoyed it. I was wowed when I realized that too. So many amazing things going on behind the scenes.

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kef profile image
Kef

Great series, i learned a lot. Thank you for sharing. You really did your homework on this. Keep them coming.

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gbengelebs profile image
Elegberun Olugbenga

Thank you Kef, Glad you enjoyed it. Definitely more coming

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tony spencer

This is a great article. Nice job! No wonder my Netflix rates keep going up….lol

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gbengelebs profile image
Elegberun Olugbenga

Lool, I guess that's the price we pay for their good work 😅

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KingRoyaltea

Good day elegberun can you please help me with an asp.net application

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csanni profile image
csanni • Edited

Thanks for aggregating things at one blog ! Great effort !

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Sourjaya Das

Great Read. Motivated me to write about another system and its design which is not properly documented under one post.

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ironbats

Amazing