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…

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…

A Day in the Life of an Experimentation and Causal Inference Scientist @ Netflix

Source credit: Netflix Within the rapid expansion of data-related roles in the last decade, the title Data Scientist has emerged as an umbrella term for myriad skills and areas of business focus. What does this title mean within a given company, or even within a given industry…

Introducing SVT-AV1: a scalable open-source AV1 framework

Netflix Headquarters, Winchester Circle. Netflix headquarters circa 2014. It’s a nice building with good architecture! This was the primary home of Netflix for a number of years during the company’s growth, but at some point Netflix had outgrown its home and needed more space. One approach to solve this problem would have been to…

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…

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…

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…

Applying Netflix DevOps Patterns to Windows

By Justin Phelps and Manuel Correa Customizing Windows images at Netflix was a manual, error-prone, and time consuming process. In this blog post, we describe how we improved the methodology, which technologies we leveraged, and how this has improved service deployment and consistency. Artisan Crafted Images In the Netflix…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Keeping Customers Streaming — The Centralized Site Reliability Practice at Netflix

We’re privileged to be in the business of bringing joy to our customers at Netflix. Whether it’s a compelling new series or an innovative product feature, we strive to provide a best-in-class service that people love and can enjoy anytime, anywhere…

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…

Building a Rule-Based Platform to Manage Netflix Membership SKUs at Scale

At Netflix, we aspire to entertain the world. From mailing DVDs in the US to a global streaming service with over 200 million subscribers across 190 countries, we have come a long way. For the longest time, Netflix had three plans (basic/standard/premium)…

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…

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…

Netflix Studio Hack Day — May 2019

Hack Days are a big deal at Netflix. They’re a chance to bring together employees from all our different disciplines to explore new ideas and experiment with emerging technologies. For the most recent hack day, we channeled our creative energy towards…

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…

Full Cycle Developers at Netflix

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…

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…

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…

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…