Open Sourcing Zuul 2

Page Simulator

At Netflix, we spend a lot of effort to make it easy for our members to find content they will love. To make this happen, we personalize many aspects of our service, including…

Quasi Experimentation at Netflix

Experimentation informs much of our decision making at Netflix. We design, analyze, and execute experiments with rigor so that we have confidence that the changes we’re making are the right ones for our members and our business. We have many years of experience running…

Re-Architecting the Video Gatekeeper

This is the story about how the Content Setup Engineering team used Hollow, a Netflix OSS technology, to re-architect and simplify an essential component in our content pipeline — delivering a large amount of business value in the process. The Context Each movie and show on the Netflix service is carefully curated…

Optimizing the Aural Experience on Android Devices with xHE-AAC

Introduction At Netflix, we are passionate about delivering great audio to our members. We began streaming 5.1 channel surround sound in 2010, Dolby Atmos in 2017, and adaptive bitrate audio in 2019. Continuing in this tradition, we are proud to announce that Netflix now streams…

AVIF for Next-Generation Image Coding

TL; DR We need an alternative to JPEG that a) is widely supported, b) has better compression efficiency and c) has a wider feature set. We believe AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) has the potential. Using the…

Netflix at Spark+AI Summit 2018

A glimpse at Spark usage for Netflix Recommendations Apache Spark has been an immensely popular big data platform for distributed computing. Netflix has been using Spark extensively for various batch and stream-processed workloads. A substantial list of use cases for Spark computation come from the various applications in the domain of content recommendations and personalization…

Netflix Drive

Written by Vikram Krishnamurthy, Kishore Kasi, Abhishek Kapatkar, Tejas Chopra, Prudhviraj Karumanchi, Kelsey Francis, Shailesh Birari In this post, we are introducing Netflix Drive, a Cloud drive for media assets and providing a high level overview of some of its features and interfaces. We intend this to be a first…

Essential Suite — Artwork Producer Assistant

Introduction Netflix continues to invest in content for a global audience with a diverse range of unique tastes and interests. Correspondingly, the member experience must also evolve to connect this global audience to the content that most appeals to each of them. Images that represent…

Netflix at MIT CODE 2020

In November, Netflix was a proud sponsor of the 2020 Conference on Digital Experimentation (CODE), hosted by the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. As well as providing sponsorship, Netflix data scientists were active participants, with three contributions. Eskil Forsell and colleagues presented a poster describing Success stories…

Android Rx onError Guidelines

“Creating a good API is hard.” — anyone who has created an API used by others As with any API, wrapping your data stream in a Rx observable requires consideration for reasonable error handling and intuitive behavior. The following guidelines are intended to help developers create consistent…

Seamlessly Swapping the API backend of the Netflix Android app

by Rohan Dhruva, Ed Ballot As Android developers, we usually have the luxury of treating our backends as magic boxes running in the cloud, faithfully returning us JSON. At Netflix, we have adopted the Backend for Frontend (BFF) pattern: instead of having one general purpose “backend API”, we have one…

Reimagining Experimentation Analysis at Netflix

Another day, another custom script to analyze an A/B test. Maybe you’ve done this before and have an old script lying around. If it’s new, it’s probably going to take some time to set up, right? Not at Netflix. ABlaze: The standard view…

Empowering the Visual Effects Community with the NetFX Platform

At Netflix, we want to entertain our global membership with series and films from around the world. In line with that, we’re excited to announce NetFX, a cloud-based platform that will make it easier for…

Beyond REST

by Dane Avilla The entertainment industry has struggled with COVID-19 restrictions impacting productions around the globe. Since early 2020, Netflix has been iteratively developing systems to provide internal stakeholders and business leaders with up-to-date tools and dashboards with the latest information on the pandemic. These software solutions allow executive leadership…

Netflix OSS and Spring Boot — Coming Full Circle

In 2007, Netflix started on a long road towards fully operating in the cloud. Much of Netflix’s backend and mid-tier applications are built using Java, and as part of this effort Netflix engineering built several cloud infrastructure libraries and systems — Ribbon for load balancing, Eureka for service discovery, and…

Analytics at Netflix: Who we are and what we do

by Molly Jackman & Meghana Reddy Explained: Season 1 (Photo Credit: Netflix) Across nearly every industry, there is recognition that data analytics is key to driving informed business decision-making. But there is far less agreement on what that term “data analytics” actually means — or what to call the people responsible for the work. Even within…

My (Seemingly) Random Walk to Netflix

By Sean Barnes, Studio Production Data Science & Engineering I am going to tell you a story about a person that works for Netflix. That person grew up dreaming of working in the entertainment industry. They attended the University of Southern California, double majored in data science and television &…

How Netflix microservices tackle dataset pub-sub

Introduction In a microservice architecture such as Netflix’s, propagating datasets from a single source to multiple downstream destinations can be challenging. These datasets can represent anything from service configuration to the results of a batch job, are often needed in-memory to optimize access and must be updated as…

ConsoleMe: A Central Control Plane for AWS Permissions and Access

By Curtis Castrapel, Patrick Sanders, and Hee Won Kim At AWS re:Invent 2020, we open sourced two new tools for managing multi-account AWS permissions and access. We’re very excited to bring you ConsoleMe (pronounced: kuhn-soul-mee), and its CLI utility, Weep…

Bringing Rich Experiences to Memory-constrained TV Devices

Netflix has over 148M paid members streaming on more than half a billion devices spanning over 1,900 different types. In the TV space alone, there are hundreds of device types that run the Netflix app. We need to support the same rich Netflix…

Remote Workstations for the Discerning Artists

Netflix is poised to become the world’s most prolific producer of visual effects and original animated content. To meet that demand, we need to attract the world’s best artistic talent. Artists like to work at places where they can create groundbreaking entertainment instead of worrying about getting…

Byte Down: Making Netflix’s Data Infrastructure Cost-Effective

Background on data efficiency At Netflix, we invest heavily in our data infrastructure which is composed of dozens of data platforms, hundreds of data producers and consumers, and petabytes of data. At many other organizations, an effective way to manage data infrastructure costs is to…

Building a Cross-platform In-app Messaging Orchestration Service

Thoughtful, relevant, and timely messaging is an integral part of a customer’s Netflix experience. The Netflix Messaging Engineering team builds the platform and the messages to communicate with Netflix customers. Messages in the Netflix App In-app messages at Netflix fall broadly into two channels — Notifications and Alerts. Notifications are content recommendations that show up…

Keystone Real-time Stream Processing Platform