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Vinamra Mittal
Vinamra Mittal

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Netflix's DevOps Journey: From DVD Rentals to Global Streaming Dominance

Introduction: Unveiling the Secrets Behind Netflix's Global Success

Yesterday, after watching a movie on Netflix I thought, how did Netflix become globally the most used streaming service, only with a single video-streaming application? After studying a little I got to know that, most of its success is owed to its ability to adopt new technologies and implement them into its DevOps approach. This allows Netflix to innovate quickly to meet consumer demands and enhance user experiences with many business benefits.

Netflix Is a master of DevOps.

Netflix has influenced the tech world by setting new standards in IT and leaving many top tech companies behind in terms of tech innovations. It has nearly 209 million subscribers & streaming in over 190 countries.

DevOps approach helped them to push new features faster, and achieve near-perfect uptime. This increased number of subscribers and streaming hours.

Their journey towards DevOps began in August of 2008, when they experienced a major database corruption and for three days could not ship DVDs to their members. That is when they realized that they had to move away from vertically-scaled single points of failure, like relational databases in a datacentre, towards highly reliable, horizontally-scalable, distributed systems in the cloud.

When they switched from delivering DVDs to streaming videos over the internet, there weren’t many tools available that could help the company’s massive cloud infrastructure to run smoothly.
Firstly, Netflix moved its infrastructure to the cloud. Now they were able to scale their services. This process took several years to complete.

They realized the scalability advantages of the cloud and used AWS to handle the load of building the best data centers. So, they could focus on their product only.

Netflix also implemented containerization. Due to this, they had consistency between environments & which helped them with scaling, reliability, and efficient rollbacks.

Afterward, they developed their container management tool called Titus. Titus provided Netflix scale cluster, resource management, and container execution with deep Amazon EC2 integration and common Netflix infrastructure enablement.

So nowadays Netflix can easily cope with issues like partial service outages on its own within a significantly less time period.

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