[jaytaylor]

I understand the site isn't static, but fundamentally what they are serving are static video streams. Encoding for video streams of varying quality levels is entirely pre-computed, and thus seem like static assets. Anyways, my gripe is that I am not seeing the good reason(s) for not having a working failover plan ready to go at all times for the service driving a publicly traded company. Even scale doesn't seem like a good reason, as I'm sure Google GCE would love to get a few slices of the Netflix pie. So I'm just left perplexed..

[mioelnir]

The video streams are delivered from their OpenConnect appliances. The video encoding, their actual website and all the client interaction is run in AWS, active/active in three regions (and multiple availability zones per region).

The AWS part is also very dynamic, at any given time most customers are (unknowingly/behind the scenes) participating in 8-10 beta features.

That said, this is all based on talks and presentations they have given at various conferences in the past. It could be different, especially some AWS parts.

[teraflop]

Obviously they do have a failover plan, but no plan is infallible -- especially when it involves a complex distributed software system plus human decision-making.

You never notice all the times when the failover is executed smoothly with no interruption in service, just the times when something goes wrong.

[seanp2k2]

And I promise that there are fail overs, simulations, testing, smaller issues, moving loads around, etc happening all the time behind the scenes. Getting caught out is no fun, but it's a very low percentage of the times when changing the tires on the bus driving down the freeway just goes [mostly] without a hitch.