Our learnings from adopting GraphQL

by Artem Shtatnov and Ravi Srinivas Ranganathan In an earlier blog post, we provided a high-level overview of some of the applications in the Marketing Technology team that we build to enable scale and intelligence in driving our global advertising, which reaches users on sites like The New York Times…

Beyond Interactive: Notebook Innovation at Netflix

Notebooks have rapidly grown in popularity among data scientists to become the de facto standard for quick prototyping and exploratory analysis. At Netflix, we’re pushing the boundaries even further, reimagining what a notebook can be, who can use it, 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…

Edge Authentication and Token-Agnostic Identity Propagation

As most developers can attest, dealing with security protocols and identity tokens, as well as user and device authentication, can be challenging. Imagine having multiple protocols, multiple tokens, 200M+ users…

How Netflix uses Druid for Real-time Insights to Ensure a High-Quality Experience

Ensuring a consistently great Netflix experience while continuously pushing innovative technology updates is no easy feat. How can we be confident that updates are not harming our users? And that we’re actually making measurable improvements when we intend to? Using real-time logs from playback devices as a…

Bringing 4K and HDR to Anime at Netflix with Sol Levante

Some might dismiss them as simple cartoons, but anime’s diverse and fantastical stories, vibrant style, and delicate lines are an art form that has evolved and grown in popularity, variety and sophistication over the last fifty years. From its likely roots in colorful painted…

Unbundling Data Science Workflows with Metaflow and AWS Step Functions

tl;dr Today, we are releasing a new job scheduler integration with AWS Step Functions. This integration allows the users of Metaflow to schedule their production workflows using a highly available, scalable, maintenance-free service, without…

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…

Spinnaker Sets Sail to the Continuous Delivery Foundation

Since releasing Spinnaker to the open source community in 2015, the platform has flourished with the addition of new cloud providers, triggers, pipeline stages, and much more. Myriad new features, improvements, and innovations have been added by an ever growing, actively engaged community. Each new innovation has…

Making our Android Studio Apps Reactive with UI Components & Redux

Recently Netflix has started building mobile apps to bring technology and innovation to our Studio Physical Productions, the portion of the business responsible for producing our TV shows and movies. Our very first mobile app is called Prodicle and was…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

ML Platform Meetup: Infra for Contextual Bandits and Reinforcement Learning

Infrastructure for Contextual Bandits and Reinforcement Learning — theme of the ML Platform meetup hosted at Netflix, Los Gatos on Sep 12, 2019. Contextual and Multi-armed Bandits enable faster and adaptive alternatives to traditional A/B Testing. They enable rapid learning and better decision-making for product rollouts. Broadly speaking, these approaches…

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…

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…

Full Cycle Developers at Netflix

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…

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…

Multi-Cloud Continuous Delivery with Spinnaker report now available.

We’re pleased to announce the release of our O’Reilly report, Continuous Delivery with Spinnaker. The report is available to download for free on the Spinnaker website. ( Pdf | Epub | Mobi ) About The Report At…

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…