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Global video streaming at massive scale

Netflix Streaming Platform

Netflix

Netflix serves over 200 million subscribers across 190+ countries, streaming billions of hours of content monthly. Their architecture relies on a globally distributed CDN backed by AWS, with microservices handling everything from user authentication to real-time recommendation. Ideal for engineers building video-on-demand platforms that must deliver content reliably to millions of concurrent viewers.

Data Flow

Global CDN
API Gateway
Event Stream
Encoding Lambda
Streaming Service
User Service
Recommendation Engine
User Database
Redis Cache
Video Storage

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Service Breakdown (10 services)

Compute4 services
Streaming Service
  • •Runs containerized microservices at scale
  • •Auto-scales based on CPU and memory utilization
  • •Supports rolling deployments and health checks
User Service
  • •Runs containerized microservices at scale
  • •Auto-scales based on CPU and memory utilization
  • •Supports rolling deployments and health checks
Recommendation Engine
  • •Runs containerized microservices at scale
  • •Auto-scales based on CPU and memory utilization
  • •Supports rolling deployments and health checks
Encoding Lambda
  • •Executes serverless functions on demand
  • •Scales automatically with zero idle cost
  • •Ideal for event-driven and async workflows
Storage1 service
Video Storage
  • •Stores objects with eleven 9s of durability
  • •Supports lifecycle policies for cost optimization
  • •Serves as a data lake foundation
Networking2 services
Global CDN
  • •Caches and delivers content at the edge globally
  • •Reduces latency with geographically distributed PoPs
  • •Handles SSL termination for all inbound traffic
API Gateway
  • •Routes and throttles incoming API requests
  • •Enforces authentication and rate limiting
  • •Provides a unified entry point for microservices
Messaging1 service
Event Stream
  • •Ingests real-time streaming data at scale
  • •Supports multiple consumers per stream
  • •Buffers events for downstream processing
Data2 services
User Database
  • •Manages relational databases with automated backups
  • •Supports Multi-AZ for high availability
  • •Handles read replicas for scaling reads
Redis Cache
  • •Caches hot data in-memory for sub-ms latency
  • •Supports Redis and Memcached engines
  • •Reduces database load with intelligent caching

Scaling Strategy

Netflix uses a combination of horizontal auto-scaling for stateless microservices, regional CDN edge caching to minimize origin load, and Kinesis-based event streaming for decoupled async processing. Each microservice scales independently based on its own traffic patterns, and Chaos Monkey continuously validates that the system tolerates random instance failures without user impact.

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