Re:A million-dollar engineering problem
by pm90 on Thursday March 16, 2017 @03:35PM
(#13888385)
I've always found it interesting that Netflix has not at least tried to go off AWS; if only because Amazon has a competing service with Amazon video. I'm sure its not an easy problem to solve, but Dropbox has gone off AWS as well; it seems like they would be much better served with their own "Video Cloud" with specialized hardware for streaming/processing videos.
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Netflix realizes that the value presented by AWS for outweighs the costs. If you feel differently, you should probably ask yourself what information you are missing, rather than just dismissing Netflix and their decision. It's clear that Netflix knows more about operating applications with tens of millions of simultaneous global users than most companies...
>If you feel differently, you should probably ask yourself what information you are missing
That's something that should be applied almost universally. :)
I don't think Netflix and Amazon really compete yet. Very few people see the two services as either/or. They're more allies against the cable companies at the moment.
Netflix doesn't use AWS for streaming video.
You make a good point that Netflix has a pretty sophisticated system for delivering video (not just served from AWS Cloudfront). However IIUC they still use AWS for preparing video files for their CDN.
Dropbox is an example where their core business is very data-intensive and AWS costs can be considerable.
I'm thinking of services, say the automated robo-built sadwiches, or the Easy 401 service, or the luxury shoes startup (all real YC-accepted companies), where the core business proposition isn't necessarily dependent on having a huge infrastructure.