Evolution of Application Data Caching : From RAM to SSD

Optimized shot-based encodes for 4K: Now streaming!

Netflix has an ever-expanding collection of titles which customers can enjoy in 4K resolution with a suitable device and subscription plan. Netflix creates premium bitstreams for those titles in addition to the catalog-wide 8-bit stream profiles¹. Premium features comprise a…

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…

Data Compression for Large-Scale Streaming Experimentation

Ever wonder why Netflix works so well when you’re streaming at home, on the train, or in a foreign hotel? Behind the scenes, Netflix engineers are constantly striving to improve the quality of your streaming service. The…

Data Engineers of Netflix — Interview with Dhevi Rajendran

This post is part of our “Data Engineers of Netflix” interview series, where our very own data engineers talk about their journeys to Data Engineering @ Netflix. Dhevi Rajendran is a Data Engineer on the Growth Data Science and Engineering team. Dhevi joined Netflix in July 2020 and is one…

Hyper Scale VPC Flow Logs enrichment to provide Network Insight

The Cloud Network Infrastructure that Netflix utilizes today is a large distributed ecosystem that consists of specialized functional tiers and services such as DirectConnect, VPC Peering, Transit Gateways, NAT Gateways, etc. While we strive to keep the ecosystem simple, the inherent nature of leveraging…

Mythbusting the Analytics Journey

by Alex Diamond This Q&A aims to mythbust some common misconceptions about succeeding in analytics at a big tech company. This isn’t your typical recruiting story. I wasn’t actively looking for a new job and Netflix was the only place I applied. I didn’t know anyone who worked there and just submitted my resume through the Jobs page 🤷🏼‍♀️ . I wasn’t even entirely sure what…

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…

Evolution of Netflix Conductor:

By Anoop Panicker and Kishore Banala Conductor is a workflow orchestration engine developed and open-sourced by Netflix. If you’re new to Conductor, this earlier blogpost and the documentation should help you get started and acclimatized to Conductor. Netflix Conductor: A microservices orchestrator visibility into distributed workflowsmedium.com In the last two years since inception, Conductor has seen wide adoption and…

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…

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…

Hawkins: Diving into the Reasoning Behind our Design System

by Hawkins team member Joshua Godi; with cover art from Martin Bekerman and additional imagery from Wiki Chaves Hawkins may be the name of a fictional town in Indiana, most widely known as the backdrop for one of Netflix’s most popular TV series “Stranger Things,” but the name is so…

Ready for changes with Hexagonal Architecture

As the production of Netflix Originals grows each year, so does our need to build apps that enable efficiency throughout the entire creative process. Our wider Studio Engineering Organization has built numerous apps that help content progress from pitch (aka screenplay) to playback: ranging…

Open Sourcing the Netflix Domain Graph Service Framework: GraphQL for Spring Boot

Netflix has developed a Domain Graph Service (DGS) framework and it is now open source. The DGS framework simplifies the implementation of GraphQL, both for standalone and federated GraphQL services. Our framework is battle-hardened by our…

Improving our video encodes for legacy devices

Netflix has been one of the pioneers of streaming video-on-demand content — we announced our intention to stream video over 13 years ago, in January 2007 — and have only increased both our device and content reach since then…

Computational Causal Inference at Netflix

Every Netflix data scientist, whether their background is from biology, psychology, physics, economics, math, statistics, or biostatistics, has made meaningful contributions to the way Netflix analyzes causal effects. Scientists from these fields have made many advancements in causal effects research in the past few decades, spanning…

Scaling Revenue & Growth Tooling

This post shares how the Revenue & Growth Tools (RGT) team approaches creating full-stack tools for the teams that are the financial backbone of Netflix. Our primary partners are the teams of Revenue and Growth Engineering (RGE): Growth, Membership, Billing, Payments…

Streaming Video Experimentation at Netflix: Visualizing Practical and Statistical Significance

Streaming video experimentation at Netflix seeks to optimize the Quality of Experience (QoE for short) of the videos we stream to our 130 million members around the world. To measure QoE, we look at a wide variety of metrics for each playback session, including play delay; the…

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…

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…

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…

DBLog: A Generic Change-Data-Capture Framework

Overview Change-Data-Capture (CDC) allows capturing committed changes from a database in real-time and propagating those changes to downstream consumers [1][2]. CDC is becoming increasingly popular for use cases that require keeping multiple heterogeneous datastores in sync (like MySQL and ElasticSearch) and addresses challenges that exist with traditional…

Building and Scaling Data Lineage at Netflix to Improve Data Infrastructure Reliability, and…

Imagine yourself in the role of a data-inspired decision maker staring at a metric on a dashboard about to make a critical business decision but pausing to ask a question — “Can I run a check myself to understand what data is behind…

Part 2: Scheduling Notebooks at Netflix

At Netflix we’ve put substantial effort into adopting notebooks as an integrated development platform. The idea started as a discussion of what development and collaboration interfaces might look like in the future. It evolved into a strategic bet on notebooks, both as…

Netflix Studio Hack Day — May 2019

Hack Days are a big deal at Netflix. They’re a chance to bring together employees from all our different disciplines to explore new ideas and experiment with emerging technologies. For the most recent hack day, we channeled our creative energy towards…