Re:Lessons Netflix Learned from the AWS Storm
by snowwrestler on Friday July 06, 2012 @04:30PM
(#4209507)
I think it's worth considering that Netflix is the single largest source of downstream Internet traffic in all of North America. The most recent estimates I could find--from about a year ago--are that at peak, Netflix streaming consumes between about 20% and 30% of all NA available downstream bandwidth. So while Quantcast is obviously a highly available service, it seems likely to me the server resources involved are probably quite a bit higher at Netflix.
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Re:Lessons Netflix Learned from the AWS Storm
by dangrossman on Friday July 06, 2012 @04:43PM
(#4209563)
The video stream itself is coming off a separate CDN, not their EC2 infrastructure, AFAIK. So that's probably not part of the comparable stuff. What's running on EC2 is the website, the authentication services for all the devices they support, the API for websites and all those devices they support, the recommendation engine, and perhaps a couple million people pinging them every few seconds with the status of their streams. I don't know how that works, but they must be talking to something since reloading a stream on any device will resume where you left off.