Machine Learning for a Better Developer Experience

Imagine having to go through 2.5GB (not often, but does happen time to time) log entries from a failed software build — 3 million lines — to search for a bug or a regression that happened on line 1M. It’s probably not even doable manually! However…

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…

Seamlessly Swapping the API backend of the Netflix Android app

by Rohan Dhruva, Ed Ballot As Android developers, we usually have the luxury of treating our backends as magic boxes running in the cloud, faithfully returning us JSON. At Netflix, we have adopted the Backend for Frontend (BFF) pattern: instead of having one general purpose “backend API”, we have one…

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…

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…

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…

ConsoleMe: A Central Control Plane for AWS Permissions and Access

By Curtis Castrapel, Patrick Sanders, and Hee Won Kim At AWS re:Invent 2020, we open sourced two new tools for managing multi-account AWS permissions and access. We’re very excited to bring you ConsoleMe (pronounced: kuhn-soul-mee), and its CLI utility, Weep…

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…

Android Rx onError Guidelines

“Creating a good API is hard.” — anyone who has created an API used by others As with any API, wrapping your data stream in a Rx observable requires consideration for reasonable error handling and intuitive behavior. The following guidelines are intended to help developers create consistent…

Netflix Hack Day — November 2019

Hack Day at Netflix is an opportunity to build and show off a feature, tool, or quirky app. The goal is simple: experiment with new ideas/technologies, engage with colleagues across different disciplines, and have fun! We know even the silliest idea…

Bringing Rich Experiences to Memory-constrained TV Devices

Netflix has over 148M paid members streaming on more than half a billion devices spanning over 1,900 different types. In the TV space alone, there are hundreds of device types that run the Netflix app. We need to support the same rich Netflix…

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…

Cache warming: Agility for a stateful service

EVCache has been a fundamental part of the Netflix platform (we call it Tier-1), holding Petabytes of data. Our caching layer serves multiple use cases from signup, personalization, searching, playback, and more. It is comprised of thousands of nodes in…

Engineering to Improve Marketing Effectiveness (Part 2) — Scaling Ad Creation and Management

In the first part of this series of blogs, we described our philosophy, motivations, and approach to blending ad technology into our marketing. In addition, we laid out some of the engineering undertakings to solve creative development and localization at scale. In this Part-2…

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…

Lessons from Building Observability Tools at Netflix

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…

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…

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…

Modernizing the Web Playback UI

Since 2013, the user experience of playing videos on the Netflix website has changed very little. During this period, teams at Netflix have rolled out amazing video playback features, but the visual design and user controls of the playback UI have remained the same. The visual design and user controls…

Introducing Netflix Timed Text Authoring Lineage

By: Bhanu Srikanth, Andy Swan, Casey Wilms, Patrick Pearson The Art of Dubbing and Subtitling Dubbing and subtitling are inherently creative processes. At Netflix, we strive to make shows as joyful to watch in every language as in the original language, whether a member watches with original or dubbed audio, closed captions…

Edgar: Solving Mysteries Faster with Observability

by Elizabeth Carretto Our Team — Kevin Lew, Maulik Pandey, Narayanan Arunachalam, Dustin Haffner, Andrei Ushakov, Seth Katz, Greg Burrell, Ram Vaithilingam, Mike Smith and Elizabeth Carretto Everyone loves Unsolved Mysteries. There’s always someone who seems like the surefire culprit. There’s a clear motive, the perfect opportunity, and an…

Reimagining Experimentation Analysis at Netflix

Another day, another custom script to analyze an A/B test. Maybe you’ve done this before and have an old script lying around. If it’s new, it’s probably going to take some time to set up, right? Not at Netflix. ABlaze: The standard view…

Engineering a Studio Quality Experience With High-Quality Audio at Netflix

Remember the epic opening sequence of Stranger Things 2? The thrill of that car chase through Pittsburgh not only introduced a whole new set of mysteries, but it returned…

Keystone Real-time Stream Processing Platform