A Look Under the Hood of the Most Successful Streaming Service on the Planet (theverge.com) 21
A service's guts, the engineering behind the app itself, are the foundation of any streamer's success, and Netflix has spent the last 10 years building out an expansive server network called Open Connect in order to avoid many modern streaming headaches. From a report: It's the thing that's allowed Netflix to serve up a far more reliable experience than its competitors and not falter when some 111 million users tuned in to Squid Game during its earliest weeks on the service. "One of the reasons why Netflix is the leader in this market and has the number of subs they do [...] is something that pretty much everybody outside of the technical part of this industry underestimates, and that is Open Connect," Dan Rayburn, a media streaming expert and principal analyst with Frost & Sullivan, tells The Verge. "How many times has Netflix had a problem with their streaming service over the last 10 years?"
Certainly not as many as HBO Max, that's for sure. Open Connect was created because Netflix "knew that we needed to build some level of infrastructure technology that would sustain the anticipated traffic that we knew success would look like," Gina Haspilaire, Netflix's vice president of Open Connect, tells me. "We felt we were going to be successful, and we knew that the internet at the time was not built to sustain the level of traffic that would be required globally." Nobody wants to sit down to watch a movie only to have their app crash or buffer for an eternity. What Netflix had the foresight to understand was that if it was going to maintain a certain level of quality, it would have to build a distribution system itself.
Open Connect is Netflix's in-house content distribution network specifically built to deliver its TV shows and movies. Started in 2012, the program involves Netflix giving internet service providers physical appliances that allow them to localize traffic. These appliances store copies of Netflix content to create less strain on networks by eliminating the number of channels that content has to pass through to reach the user trying to play it. Most major streaming services rely on third-party content delivery networks (CDNs) to pass along their videos, which is why Netflix's server network is so unique. Without a system like Open Connect or a third-party CDN in place, a request for content by an ISP has to "go through a peering point and maybe transit four or five other networks until it gets to the origin, or the place that holds the content," Will Law, chief architect of media engineering at Akamai, a major content delivery network, tells The Verge. Not only does that slow down delivery, but it's expensive since ISPs may have to pay to access that content. To avoid the traffic and fees, Netflix ships copies of its content to its own servers ahead of time. That also helps to prevent Netflix traffic from choking network demand during peak hours of streaming.
Certainly not as many as HBO Max, that's for sure. Open Connect was created because Netflix "knew that we needed to build some level of infrastructure technology that would sustain the anticipated traffic that we knew success would look like," Gina Haspilaire, Netflix's vice president of Open Connect, tells me. "We felt we were going to be successful, and we knew that the internet at the time was not built to sustain the level of traffic that would be required globally." Nobody wants to sit down to watch a movie only to have their app crash or buffer for an eternity. What Netflix had the foresight to understand was that if it was going to maintain a certain level of quality, it would have to build a distribution system itself.
Open Connect is Netflix's in-house content distribution network specifically built to deliver its TV shows and movies. Started in 2012, the program involves Netflix giving internet service providers physical appliances that allow them to localize traffic. These appliances store copies of Netflix content to create less strain on networks by eliminating the number of channels that content has to pass through to reach the user trying to play it. Most major streaming services rely on third-party content delivery networks (CDNs) to pass along their videos, which is why Netflix's server network is so unique. Without a system like Open Connect or a third-party CDN in place, a request for content by an ISP has to "go through a peering point and maybe transit four or five other networks until it gets to the origin, or the place that holds the content," Will Law, chief architect of media engineering at Akamai, a major content delivery network, tells The Verge. Not only does that slow down delivery, but it's expensive since ISPs may have to pay to access that content. To avoid the traffic and fees, Netflix ships copies of its content to its own servers ahead of time. That also helps to prevent Netflix traffic from choking network demand during peak hours of streaming.
Re: (Score:2)
I mean this place has what, dozens of readers? Why would anyone bother here when you have places like reddit with tens of millions of daily users?
Re: (Score:1)
In other words... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not necessarily. It could be so popular that ISPs have the appliances and still can't push out the bandwidth from the appliance to their users.
priming the pump (Score:5, Insightful)
They've been keeping cached content on major ISP transit points for a long time. Win for netflix, win for the ISP's trying to manage the spikey elephant through a straw delivery issues, and a win for both of their customers who just want to quickly get content without any fuss.
Re: (Score:2)
Caching (Score:5, Interesting)
No reason for ISPs not to cache this stuff. We had a caching Squid proxy set up for the university computer lab I worked at in 1998. Cut down our internet traffic by 20-30% over the course of a week. We even looked at the most popular 100 web sites people would visit and set up a wget crawler to scrape the contents into the squid cache every morning.
Re: (Score:2)
Traffic was not encrypted back in 1998, so you could sniff the HTTP headers, identify the content, cache it and serve it without ugly tricks that break the current end-to-end security model.
Not to be confused (Score:2)
Not to be confused with openconnect, an open source implementation of VPN software from Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto, Fortinet, Pulse, ...
https://www.infradead.org/open... [infradead.org]
Remember when (Score:2)
Netflix used to make all its money by snail-mailing DVDs?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Re: (Score:3)
Netflix used to make all its money by snail-mailing DVDs?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
They still do that too [netflix.com]. Blu-ray as well.
Re: (Score:2)
They still have a DVD/Blu-Ray program but it's not how they make money.
Re: (Score:2)
They still have a DVD/Blu-Ray program but it's not how they make money.
It may not be how they make most of their money, but I guarantee that if it was not profitable they would shut it down immediately.
Simian army (Score:3)
They have also developed many tools to test the resiliency of their systems. There is a ten-year old blog post [netflixtechblog.com] about their "simian army", where each simian is a tool that degrades some part of their production system, and lets them know how well their automated system recovers a smooth service.
Let's just hope they do not automate everything so much as to completely pull themselves out of the Internet [slashdot.org] when their backbone fails.
Why Netflix never goes down (Score:1)
What is the largest streaming service in the world (Score:1)