>That excess compute is essentially free.
Since they host on AWS, wouldn't they just scale down during non-peak times and save money?
They do, but as any large AWS customer you want to reserve a lot of capacity, so that it's there when you need it and also it's a lot cheaper than spot usage. So, scaling down below the reserved capacity doesn't save you much if anything.
The AWS-hosted part is not the CDN afaik, which will probably make up the vast majority of their infrastructure.
Speaking as an ISP: Netflix traffic comes from the Netflix ASN and peering session. Their globally distributed CDN/caching/video file storage servers are not on AWS to the best of my knowledge. Netflix traffic does not come from our peering with Amazon's ASN.
If you're talking about OpenConnect, then I think they are really geared to just be a CDN and not much else.
Netflix has an internal spot market for compute, letting them use their reserved instances somewhat optimally.
Re:The End of Video Coding?
by jadedhacker on Thursday June 14, 2018 @01:14AM
(#17309474)
For what it's worth, I don't know what YouTube's actual constraints look like, but it doesn't seem implausible that they might still be open to reencoding their top 10k video. After a billion views, you might get some substantial savings.
EDIT: After all, they did implement VP8/9 ;)
Re #1: It's not catalog size that matters; it's more like revenue per minute of video, or views per minute of video
Re #2: This is a fairly standard batch-vs-online compute mix tradeoff faced by large enterprises.
1) They have a fairly limited catalog (contrast with the constant ingestion of new content by Youtube, for example)
2) The cheapest way for them to ensure they have sufficient capacity to handle peak loads leaves them with a lot of extra compute during non-peak times. That excess compute is essentially free.