Implementing the Netflix Media Database

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…

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…

Engineers Making Movies (AKA Open Source Test Content)

If you’re a die-hard Netflix fan, you may have already stumbled onto the dark and brooding story of a timeless struggle between man and nature, water and fountain, ball and tether known much more plainly as Example Short. In the good old days of…

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…

Production Media Management: Transforming Media Workflows by leveraging the Cloud

In this post, we will share a behind-the-scenes look at how Netflix delivers technology and infrastructure to help production…

Optimizing data warehouse storage

Background At Netflix, our current data warehouse contains hundreds of Petabytes of data stored in AWS S3, and each day we ingest and create additional Petabytes. At this scale, we can gain a significant amount of performance and cost benefits by optimizing the storage layout (records, objects, partitions)…

Extending Vector with eBPF to inspect host and container performance

Improving the tools available to our engineers to help them diagnose, triage, and work through software performance challenges in the cloud is a key goal for the cloud performance engineering team at Netflix. Today we are excited to announce latency…

MezzFS — Mounting object storage in Netflix’s media processing platform

MezzFS (short for “Mezzanine File System”) is a tool we’ve developed at Netflix that mounts cloud objects as local files via FUSE. It’s used extensively in our media processing platform, which includes services like Archer and runs features like…

Netflix Studio Engineering Overview

Netflix is revolutionizing the way a modern studio operates. Our mission in Studio Engineering is to build a unified, global, and digital studio that powers the effective production of amazing content. Studio Engineering at Netflix …

Lerner — using RL agents for test case scheduling

Introduction Netflix brings delightful customer experiences to homes on a variety of devices that continues to grow each day. Partners across the globe leverage Netflix device certification process on a continual basis to ensure that quality products and experiences are…

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…

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…

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…

Protecting a Story’s Future with History and Science

Kylee’s parents after their wedding in 1978. I — Kylee — have two photos from my parents’ wedding. Just two. This year they celebrated 40 years of marriage, so both photos were shot on film. Both capture a joy and awkwardness that come with young weddings. They’re…

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…

Growth Engineering at Netflix — Accelerating Innovation

Millions of people visit Netflix every day. Many of them are already Netflix members, looking to enjoy their favorite movies and TV shows, and we work hard to ensure they have a great experience. Others are not yet members, and are looking to better understand our service…

Netflix Public Bug Bounty, 1 year later

As Netflix continues to create entertainment people love, the security team continues to keep our members, partners, and employees secure. The security research community has partnered with us to improve the security of the Netflix service for the past few years through our responsible…

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…

Introducing Dispatch

Netflix is pleased to announce the open-source release of our crisis management orchestration framework: Dispatch! Okay, but what is Dispatch? Put simply, Dispatch is: All of the ad-hoc things you’re doing to manage incidents today, done for you, and a bunch of other things you should’ve been doing, but have not had the time! Dispatch helps us effectively…

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…

Announcing the Netflix Post Technology Alliance

You’re working on the next great show or film that will deliver to Netflix. You know Netflix has a high quality bar for its content and you want the delivery to go smoothly. Do you know if the tools you have invested in can…

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…

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…