Detecting Performance Anomalies in External Firmware Deployments

Netflix has over 139M members streaming on more than half a billion devices spanning over 1,700 different types of devices from hundreds of brands. This diverse device ecosystem results in a high dimensionality feature space, often with sparse data, and can make identifying device performance issues challenging…

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 riskquant, a library for quantifying risk

The End of Video Coding?

In the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine issue November 2006 article “Future of Video Coding and Transmission” Prof. Edward Delp started by asking the panelists “Is video coding dead? Some feel that, with the higher coding efficiency of the H.264/MPEG-4 . . . perhaps there is not much more to do…

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…

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…

How Data Inspires Building a Scalable, Resilient and Secure Cloud Infrastructure At Netflix

Netflix’s engineering culture is predicated on Freedom & Responsibility, the idea that everyone (and every team) at Netflix is entrusted with a core responsibility and they are free to operate with freedom to satisfy their mission. This…

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…

Open Sourcing Mantis: A Platform For Building Cost-Effective, Realtime, Operations-Focused…

Today we’re excited to announce that we’re open sourcing Mantis, a platform that helps Netflix engineers better understand the behavior of their applications to ensure the highest quality experience for our members. We…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Growth Engineering at Netflix — Automated Imagery Generation

Background There’s a good chance you’ve probably visited the Netflix homepage. In the Growth Engineering team, we refer to this as the top of the signup funnel. For more background on the signup funnel and Growth Engineering’s role in the signup funnel, please read our initial post on…

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…

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…

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…

Evolving Container Security With Linux User Namespaces

As previously discussed on the Netflix Tech Blog, Titus is the Netflix container orchestration system. It runs a wide variety of workloads from various parts of the company — everything…

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…

Pseudo Localization @ Netflix

In the past 8 years Netflix has transformed from an English-only product, to now supporting 26 languages and growing. As we add language support for our members residing in 190 different countries, scaling globalization at Netflix has never been more important. Along the way we’ve built out…

Netflix Cloud Security: Detecting Credential Compromise in AWS

Credential compromise is an important concern for anyone operating in the cloud. The problem becomes more obvious over time, as organizations continue to adopt cloud resources as part of their infrastructure without maintaining an accompanying capability to observe and react to these compromises…

Lessons from Building Observability Tools at Netflix

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…

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…

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…