Trace Event, Chrome and More Profile Formats on FlameScope

Less than a year ago, FlameScope was released as a proof of concept for a new profile visualization. Since then, it helped us, and many other users, to easily find and fix performance issues, and allowed us to see patterns that we had never noticed before in our profiles. As…

Python at Netflix

As many of us prepare to go to PyCon, we wanted to share a sampling of how Python is used at Netflix. We use Python through the full content lifecycle, from deciding which content to fund all…

Netflix at the Spinnaker Summit 2018

Since releasing Spinnaker as an open source project in late 2015, the Spinnaker user and contributor community has grown by leaps and bounds. Our strong partnership with Google and other companies has led to a plethora of innovations and features that enable rapid, safe, and reliable delivery…

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…

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…

Multi-Cloud Continuous Delivery with Spinnaker report now available.

We’re pleased to announce the release of our O’Reilly report, Continuous Delivery with Spinnaker. The report is available to download for free on the Spinnaker website. ( Pdf | Epub | Mobi ) About The Report At…

Empowering the Visual Effects Community with the NetFX Platform

At Netflix, we want to entertain our global membership with series and films from around the world. In line with that, we’re excited to announce NetFX, a cloud-based platform that will make it easier for…

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…

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…

Mythbusting the Analytics Journey

by Alex Diamond This Q&A aims to mythbust some common misconceptions about succeeding in analytics at a big tech company. This isn’t your typical recruiting story. I wasn’t actively looking for a new job and Netflix was the only place I applied. I didn’t know anyone who worked there and just submitted my resume through the Jobs page 🤷🏼‍♀️ . I wasn’t even entirely sure what…

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…

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…

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…

Engineers Making Movies (AKA Open Source Test Content)

If you’re a die-hard Netflix fan, you may have already stumbled onto the dark and brooding story of a timeless struggle between man and nature, water and fountain, ball and tether known much more plainly as Example Short. In the good old days of…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Netflix at Spark+AI Summit 2018

A glimpse at Spark usage for Netflix Recommendations Apache Spark has been an immensely popular big data platform for distributed computing. Netflix has been using Spark extensively for various batch and stream-processed workloads. A substantial list of use cases for Spark computation come from the various applications in the domain of content recommendations and personalization…

Full Cycle Developers at Netflix

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…

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…