Yeah and that's why it amazes me that Netflix uses Amazon a straight competitor that uses the money it makes from Netflix to compete with Amazon prime.
Netflix probably in a better position to do the math than random people on HN. I think they have done their homework and decided that it is overall cheaper to keep ___some___ of their infra on AWS.
Yes! Thank you! Every time some piece like this is posted 'experts' arise here and know everything better. Like there is a bunch of idiots working at Netflix who are happily burning money...
I hear this line of thinking a lot but I don't really buy it.
You could just as easily say it's amazing that Amazon allows a competitor like Netflix to run on it's platform. The reality is that relationship is more complex than that.
Netflix is going to exist regardless of whether Amazon lets them run on AWS.
Amazon letting them run on AWS is brilliant as they get a piece of Netflix's pie. So even if Netflix beats Amazon Prime, Amazon gets to dip into their pot via revenues from AWS. It's a great hedging of bets.
They're totally separate businesses. The people that treat Netflix like their customer aren't the same people making strategic decisions about Amazon Prime. Amazon is a ridiculously large company.
Migrations and self hosted infrastructure don't do themselves. Netflix can get quite a lot of stuff done on AWS for the $200k+ dollars it would take to hire one single employee.
What's the largest cloud provider that does NOT offer a Netflix-like streaming video service? Amazon/AWS, Microsoft/Azure, and Google Cloud all have offer premium streaming content of some type. IBM Cloud?
My point was that Netflix uses AWS services exclusively instead of dividing it between multiple services at least though now days they probably get really deep discounts from Amazon to stay on AWS because of competition and it probably is lot cheaper for them then building and maintaining it's their own servers.
Netflix built their own CDN ages ago. Given that their core business logic is basically static content delivery whats left to AWS probably is a lot less than commenters in this thread seem to think.