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…

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…

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…

Open-sourcing Polynote: an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook

We are pleased to announce the open-source launch of Polynote: a new, polyglot notebook with first-class Scala support, Apache Spark integration, multi-language interoperability including Scala, Python, and SQL, as-you-type autocomplete, and more. Polynote provides data scientists and machine learning researchers with a notebook environment…

Lessons from Building Observability Tools at Netflix

Evolving Regional Evacuation

At Netflix we prioritize innovation and velocity in pursuit of the best experience for our 150+ million global customers. This means that our microservices constantly evolve and change, but what doesn’t change is our responsibility to provide a highly available service that delivers 100+ million hours of daily streaming to…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

How Netflix uses eBPF flow logs at scale for network insight

Netflix has developed a network observability sidecar called Flow Exporter that uses eBPF tracepoints to capture TCP flows at near real time. At much less than 1% of CPU and memory on the instance, this highly performant sidecar provides…

Data Engineers of Netflix — Interview with Samuel Setegne

This post is part of our “Data Engineers of Netflix” interview series, where our very own data engineers talk about their journeys to Data Engineering @ Netflix. Samuel Setegne is a Senior Software Engineer on the Core Data Science and Engineering team. Samuel and his team build tools and frameworks…

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…

Achieving observability in async workflows

Managing and operating asynchronous workflows can be difficult without the proper tools and architecture that puts observability, debugging, and tracing at the forefront. Imagine getting paged outside normal work hours — users are having trouble with the application you’re responsible for…

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…

Engineering to Improve Marketing Effectiveness (Part 3) — Scaling Paid Media campaigns

Enhancing the Netflix UI Experience with HDR

Some of you have probably heard about HDR, or High Dynamic Range, which can produce a higher level of brightness, a wider range of colors, and an increased level of detail and accuracy that empowers visual storytellers to deliver more impactful experiences for…

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…

Performance comparison of video coding standards: an adaptive streaming perspective

“This is my advice to people: Learn how to cook, try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun” — Julia Child (American chef, author, and television personality) At Netflix, we are continually refining the recipes we use to serve your favorite shows and movies…

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…

SVT-AV1: an open-source AV1 encoder and decoder

SVT-AV1 is an open-source AV1 codec implementation hosted on GitHub https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1/ under a BSD + patent license. As mentioned in our earlier blog post, Intel and Netflix have been collaborating on the SVT-AV1 encoder and decoder framework since August 2018. The teams have been working closely on SVT-AV1 development, discussing…

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…

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…