How Netflix's OTT Architecture Functions?
With so many OTT platforms in the market today, Netflix has managed to capture a majority of the audience on a global scale. Netflix has become.
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Key takeaways
- With so many OTT platforms in the market today, Netflix has managed to capture a majority of the audience on a global scale.
- This enables Netflix to develop features rapidly and without waiting for approvals from various parts of the company.
- As a company with an ambitious innovation team that develops video on demand and serves millions of dollars in cloud computing and strong architecture, Netflix is an excellent example of how to keep up with technological advances.
With so many OTT platforms in the market today, Netflix has managed to capture a majority of the audience on a global scale. Netflix has become the go-to source of so much entertainment for consumers in less than 20 years. This streaming of exclusive and original content without any ads makes Netflix arguably the world’s most loved source for entertainment. It can even be said that Netflix revolutionized the world of entertainment.
Furthermore, Netflix’s popularity is attributed to the fact that it allows users to share their accounts with multiple individuals. However, if you look at Netflix’s popularity by a number of registered users, you can see how rapidly it has grown since just a few years ago. To be able to support and deliver an enormous volume of high-definition videos while scaling a system that can serve many customers requires robust engineering methodologies. Here, you will discover what tools, processes, and architecture Netflix uses to deliver its content globally through advanced technology and cloud infrastructure.
The Birth of Netflix’s OTT System Architecture
Netflix stored databases and applications in on-premises data centers that it owned and rented. Netflix used these data centers to track customers, maintain inventory, and bill customers. Ten years ago, Netflix revolutionized the way the service works by overhauling all the apes to work within a microservices architecture- this means that each application, or microservices, has its own resources and code. Netflix used an API that withholds a particular set of rules that both programs can understand and work with.
The engineering teams at Netflix can implement changes to any part of the application and can introduce new changes quickly while ensuring that they will not affect other aspects of the services as a whole. By 2008, this streaming giant switched from on-premises servers to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and started using cloud-based infrastructures to run its applications. In fact, Netflix and Amazon’s collaboration ended up being a huge win for both companies. The streaming company proved to be AWS’s most advanced customer. Netflix has continuously innovated on how to best use the servers AWS offers for various purposes and has pushed the limits of all their capabilities to the extreme.
With AWS, Netflix has the ability to rapidly improve its services and maintain stability.
Role of Netflix’s Cloud Architecture
In order to scale Netflix’s streaming service and eliminate on-premises data centers, AWS teamed up with Netflix, which then shifted the focus to developing its streaming capabilities. Netflix utilizes two clouds, AWS and Open Connect, to provide the best videos to Netflix subscribers. Together they form Netflix’s backbone, and both contribute greatly to the company’s success.
The application consists of a client, Open Connect or Netflix CDN, and a backend database. Netflix clients are devices used to browse and play Netflix videos. These include TVs, Play stations, laptops, and mobile devices. A Netflix’s content delivery network (CDN) consists of Open Connect servers, which are central to Netflix’s global distribution system. These servers are located in ISPs and IXPs around the world to provide Netflix’s content to users.
In addition to platform-specific code, Netflix’s web application is built using reactJS, which is heavily influenced by a number of factors such as startup time, runtime performance, and modularity. All functions that don’t involve video streaming are handled by the backend, such as onboarding the latest content, distributing videos to servers located all over the world, and managing network traffic.
With the power of AWS organizations and account units, Netflix can organize their engineering team to lunch resources on short notice. This enables Netflix to develop features rapidly and without waiting for approvals from various parts of the company.
Ultimately, video content must be converted into different formats for optimal viewing on different devices. Desktop videos are transcoded differently from mobile videos due to differences in screen sizes, resolutions, and network availability.
Netflix’s Streaming Architecture
Netflix uses a personalization algorithm to help identify videos based on a customer’s prior viewing history to encourage customer engagement and retention. The company achieves this through the use of data streaming technology like Kafka and NoSQL databases like DynamoDB. These applications each use a Fronting Kafka cluster to isolate sinks for each Kafka producer. The producers can change topic routing and sink configuration at runtime without restarting application processes, as dynamic configurations drive them. Kafka clusters can be migrated across this way so that things like traffic redirection can be accomplished.
Using all of these data, Netflix engineers can generate personalized videos using applications deployed on AWS EC2 OR AWS Lambda to compute customized videos. On the other hand, instead of storing all data in a database, Netflix employs Hadoop to aggregate different data types and move them into data warehouses and other databases within the company. These data are sifted by data science teams at Netflix, who use them to do business analytic like calculating the number of customers watching a particular movie pr the likelihood of someone unsubscribing.
Additionally, Netflix invented a tool known as Spinnaker, which allows development teams to test small changes, then roll them out with automated testing before going live to a definite audience.
How Does Netflix Handle Cloud Cybersecurity?
As a publicly accessible cloud, AWS makes use of multiple sets of credentials and access for users, which makes the company a pioneer in cloud security. Netflix uses cloud-based DRM solutions to prevent the blocking of certain content based on region. For example, a movie on Netflix only owns the rights to the United States and cannot be viewed in other countries. Even if caber attackers gain access to Netflix’s assets in the cloud, it won’t be possible to do much damage because they lack access to the entire set of assets in the cloud.
Techstack Used by Netflix
Understanding a teach stack is necessary before learning about the one Netflix uses. The list of all the technology services used to build and run one application is known as a technology stack, technology infrastructure or data ecosystem. Your stack includes tools that create, analyze, and ingest data and for each of them to run efficiently; they must be linked to each other.
Netflix manages its engineering tasks with Lira software and the documentation with Confluence. Since managing passwords is difficult with such a large workforce, Netflix uses single-sign-on technology like OneLogin to make it way simpler. The Netflix technology stack is Java, JavaScript, Python, Kotlin and Swift. Python, one of the fastest-growing programming languages, is used for security and scalability. It handles the entire workflow of content for Netflix. Kotlin, on the other hand, provides tooling support for other programming languages.
In addition, Netflix’s OTT architecture supports ML and AI for innovations such as data-economic encoding and use personalization, ensuring a unique user experience and content tailored to each individual’s preference.
While providing great user experience (UX), Netflix provides fully comprehensive libraries designed to enhance user experience. Netflix’s Per-title Encode Optimization was a major breakthrough in improving UX in its continual efforts.
The company also uses GitHub for code collaboration and version control. Their execution and mobile error monitoring is performed by tools, namely LogicMonitor and Apteligent.
Conclusion
Each Netflix service is composed of hundreds of microservices or separate programs. With robust engineering techniques, Netflix downloads the exact file for each show to play on your particular device for a specific quality based on how fast your internet is at that time, according to the Netflix app or website you’re using to watch. As a company with an ambitious innovation team that develops video on demand and serves millions of dollars in cloud computing and strong architecture, Netflix is an excellent example of how to keep up with technological advances.
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