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>Especially one as trivial as Netflix which is largely read-only.

I stopped reading after this, since you obviously dont understand how complex their architecture really is.




I work for a media streaming site (rank <30k on alexa) and I assure you the architecture doesn't change much when you scale it up to rank 99 (netflix).

"Trivial" may sound harsh but in terms of large scale systems it really doesn't get much simpler than serving static files. Obviously their auxiliary services (billing, content ingestion, social etc.) are nowhere near trivial. But there's no reason for the core services that are required to get the catalog and video to most[1] devices to not be damn near 100% available.

I'm not talking down netflix for having an outage anyway. Shit happens and afaik their overall track record is not bad at all. I only replied to jrockway's claim that multi-datacenter redundancy would require inconceivable engineering effort or amounts of money - neither is true.

[1] Excluding those that need realtime transcoding, absurd DRM schemes or similar.


How can you assure us of what the #99 system is like when you admit to only working on the ~30k system? That's not what "assure" means.


We actually talk to other people in the industry sometimes, imagine that...


I'm never one to trivialize another company's problems so would hesitate to say Netflix's case is easy, but you cannot counter this statement by saying their architecture is complex. I can build a complex architecture for "Hello World" if I wanted to. Complex architecture != complex problem.




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