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…

Keystone Real-time Stream Processing Platform

Netflix SIRT releases Diffy: A Differencing Engine for Digital Forensics in the Cloud

Can you spot the difference? Hint: it’s not the bow tie. The Netflix Security Intelligence and Response Team (SIRT) announces the release of Diffy under an Apache 2.0 license. Diffy is a triage tool to help digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) teams quickly identify compromised hosts on which to…

Full Cycle Developers at Netflix

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…

The Netflix Cosmos Platform

by Frank San Miguel on behalf of the Cosmos team Introduction Cosmos is a computing platform that combines the best aspects of microservices with asynchronous workflows and serverless functions. Its sweet spot is applications that involve resource-intensive algorithms coordinated via complex, hierarchical workflows that last anywhere from minutes to years. It…

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…

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 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…

How Netflix brings safer and faster streaming experience to the living room on crowded networks…

At Netflix, we are obsessed with the best streaming experiences. We want playback to start instantly and to never stop unexpectedly in any network environment. We are also committed to protecting users’ privacy and service security without sacrificing any part of the playback experience. To achieve that…

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…

Open-Sourcing Metaflow, a Human-Centric Framework for Data Science

tl;dr Metaflow is now open-source! Get started at metaflow.org. Netflix applies data science to hundreds of use cases across the company, including optimizing content delivery and video encoding. Data scientists at Netflix relish our culture that…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Design Principles for Mathematical Engineering in Experimentation Platform at Netflix

At Netflix, we have data scientists coming from many backgrounds such as neuroscience, statistics and biostatistics, economics, and physics; each of these backgrounds has a meaningful contribution to how experiments should be analyzed. To unlock these innovations we…

How Our Paths Brought Us to Data and Netflix

by Julie Beckley & Chris Pham This Q&A provides insights into the diverse set of skills, projects, and culture within Data Science and Engineering (DSE) at Netflix through the eyes of two team members: Chris Pham and Julie Beckley. Photo from a team curling offsite — There’s us to the right! [Chris] Julie and I joined the Streaming DSE team at Netflix…

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…

Netflix at AWS re:Invent 2019

AWS re:Invent is a couple weeks away and our engineers & leaders are thrilled to be in attendance yet again this year! Please stop by our “Living Room” for an opportunity to connect or reconnect with Netflixers. We’ve compiled our speaking events below so you know…

Netflix Now Streaming AV1 on Android

Today we are excited to announce that Netflix has started streaming AV1 to our Android mobile app. AV1 is a high performance, royalty-free video codec that provides 20% improved compression efficiency over our VP9† encodes. AV1 is made…

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…

Packaging award-winning shows with award-winning technology

Introduction In previous blog posts, our colleagues at Netflix have explained how 4K video streams are optimized, how even legacy video streams are improved and more recently how new audio codecs can provide better aural experiences to our members. In all these cases, prior to being delivered through…

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…

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…