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…

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…

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)…

DBLog: A Generic Change-Data-Capture Framework

Overview Change-Data-Capture (CDC) allows capturing committed changes from a database in real-time and propagating those changes to downstream consumers [1][2]. CDC is becoming increasingly popular for use cases that require keeping multiple heterogeneous datastores in sync (like MySQL and ElasticSearch) and addresses challenges that exist with traditional…

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…

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…

Open Sourcing the Netflix Domain Graph Service Framework: GraphQL for Spring Boot

Netflix has developed a Domain Graph Service (DGS) framework and it is now open source. The DGS framework simplifies the implementation of GraphQL, both for standalone and federated GraphQL services. Our framework is battle-hardened by our…

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…

How Netflix uses Druid for Real-time Insights to Ensure a High-Quality Experience

Ensuring a consistently great Netflix experience while continuously pushing innovative technology updates is no easy feat. How can we be confident that updates are not harming our users? And that we’re actually making measurable improvements when we intend to? Using real-time logs from playback devices as a…

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…

Lessons from Building Observability Tools at Netflix

How Netflix brings safer and faster streaming experience to the living room on crowded networks…

At Netflix, we are obsessed with the best streaming experiences. We want playback to start instantly and to never stop unexpectedly in any network environment. We are also committed to protecting users’ privacy and service security without sacrificing any part of the playback experience. To achieve that…

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…

Computational Causal Inference at Netflix

Every Netflix data scientist, whether their background is from biology, psychology, physics, economics, math, statistics, or biostatistics, has made meaningful contributions to the way Netflix analyzes causal effects. Scientists from these fields have made many advancements in causal effects research in the past few decades, spanning…

Key Challenges with Quasi Experiments at Netflix

At Netflix, when we can’t run A/B experiments we run quasi experiments! We run quasi experiments with various objectives such as non-member experiments focusing on acquisition, member experiments focusing on member engagement, or video streaming experiments focusing on content delivery. Consolidating on one methodology…

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…

Netflix Now Streaming AV1 on Android

Today we are excited to announce that Netflix has started streaming AV1 to our Android mobile app. AV1 is a high performance, royalty-free video codec that provides 20% improved compression efficiency over our VP9† encodes. AV1 is made…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Auto Scaling Production Services on Titus

Over the past three years, Netflix has been investing in container technology. A large part of this investment has been around Titus, Netflix’s container management platform that was open sourced in April of 2018. Titus schedules application containers…

GraphQL Search Indexing

Almost a year ago we described our learnings from adopting GraphQL on the Netflix Marketing Tech team. We have a lot more to share since then! There are plenty of existing resources describing how to express a search query in GraphQL and paginate…

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…

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…