Netflix Architecture

Streaming to hundreds of millions of devices, built to survive failure.

On the roadmap:Software Architect · step 5: Learn from the giants

Overview

Netflix runs on AWS for its control plane and on its own CDN, Open Connect, for video delivery. Its architecture is a showcase of microservices, resilience engineering and chaos testing.

Architecture highlights

Control plane on AWS, data plane on Open Connect CDN appliances
Hundreds of microservices behind an edge gateway
Active-active multi-region deployment
Chaos engineering to validate failure handling

Architecture diagram

Key components

Edge gateway (Zuul)
Routing, auth and resiliency filters for client traffic
Open Connect CDN
Caches video files inside ISP networks
Microservices
Recommendations, playback, billing, profiles
Cassandra / EVCache
Distributed storage and low-latency caching
Kafka / Keystone
Event pipeline for analytics and personalisation

Challenges and trade-offs

Regional outages
Traffic must shift between regions without users noticing.
Cascading failures
One slow dependency can take down callers; circuit breakers and fallbacks are required.
Video delivery cost
Moving petabytes over the open internet is expensive and slow.

Study: Netflix

Learn how Netflix is built from the people who explain it. Watch first for the picture, then read for the detail.

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NETFLIX System design | software architecture for netflix

Tech Dummies - Narendra Lakshmana Gowda · 476K views

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