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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Evolving Container Security With Linux User Namespaces

As previously discussed on the Netflix Tech Blog, Titus is the Netflix container orchestration system. It runs a wide variety of workloads from various parts of the company — everything…

Protecting a Story’s Future with History and Science

Kylee’s parents after their wedding in 1978. I — Kylee — have two photos from my parents’ wedding. Just two. This year they celebrated 40 years of marriage, so both photos were shot on film. Both capture a joy and awkwardness that come with young weddings. They’re…

Netflix at AWS re:Invent 2019

AWS re:Invent is a couple weeks away and our engineers & leaders are thrilled to be in attendance yet again this year! Please stop by our “Living Room” for an opportunity to connect or reconnect with Netflixers. We’ve compiled our speaking events below so you know…

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…

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…

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…

Analytics at Netflix: Who we are and what we do

by Molly Jackman & Meghana Reddy Explained: Season 1 (Photo Credit: Netflix) Across nearly every industry, there is recognition that data analytics is key to driving informed business decision-making. But there is far less agreement on what that term “data analytics” actually means — or what to call the people responsible for the work. Even within…

Predictive CPU isolation of containers at Netflix

Noisy Neighbors We’ve all had noisy neighbors at one point in our life. Whether it’s at a cafe or through a wall of an apartment, it is always disruptive. The need for good manners in shared spaces turns out to be important not just for people, but for your Docker containers too. …

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…

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…

Exploring Data @ Netflix

Supporting a rapidly growing base of engineers of varied backgrounds using different data stores can be challenging in any organization. Netflix’s internal teams strive to provide leverage by investing in easy-to-use tooling that streamlines the user experience and incorporates best practices. …

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…