Lesson Learned from Netflix in the Global Cloud [UPDATED]

Simply put, if you want to do Cloud, don't try to build one, find the best possible infrastructure web services platform in the could out there and use it! I'll try to give you a glimpse of what Adrian Cockcroft form Netflix presented this morning but omit the technical details as I will post the presentation link later in an updated version of this post.

If you don't know about Netflix, you might have been living under a rock for the past couple of years but just in case, Netflix provides services for watching TV and movies online to over 20 million users globally across multiple platforms most of which can instantly stream the content over the Internet. When Netflix decided to move its operation to the cloud, it decided to use a public Cloud. Why use the public Cloud you ask? Well... Netflix just couldn't build data centres fast enough and has decided to search for a robust and scalable Cloud offering to develop their platform on. The choice was set on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Partnering with AWS has allowed Netflix to be ~100% Cloud based! Some smaller back end bits are still not moved to the Cloud however, they are aggressively pushing to change that. The simple rational behind it all was that AWS has dedicated infrastructure support teams which Netflix did not, so the move was a no brainer.

Netflix in the Cloud on AWS

So, is your company thinking of being in the Cloud or has it started trying to build? Only time will tell which path will #win, however, know that if you want to make the move now, AWS is readily available to anyone. A lot of the content from this presentation go into the technical details of their platform architecture on AWS and I invite you to come back to this post later today for a direct link to the presentation as it becomes available. [UPDATED: Slides Link]

In the meantime, check out The Netflix "Tech" Blog for some discussion on the subject.