[redis_mlc]

> I've always been baffled when someone hosts on their competitors' platform. Like Netflix hosting on AWS

Netflix had a 5-day outage caused by issues with their private DC back in the day.

IT mgmt. decided their expertise wasn't in operating DC's, SV real estate was too expensive, and doing multi-region themselves was too expensive.

AWS was picked as it was the only viable cloud offering at the time, and the decision was made to be mono-cloud until later. (Azure was used for storing backups.)

Note that AWS was never used for large-scale streaming. Either a partner CDN was used, or now their own CDN.

Source: worked at Netflix.

[pmart123]

From my recollection, Netflix started using AWS before Amazon launched Prime Video as well?

[grogenaut]

Amazon launched and killed a video project several years before prime video

[SketchySeaBeast]

Thanks! And that makes complete sense - even for a company with that scale and budget, there's some fights not worth fighting when you can get back to doing what you do well and let someone else deal with the stuff you'd have to spend a bunch of effort getting good at.

[jakupovic]

aws was used for storage and encoding initially. source: worked at aws

[redis_mlc]

Encoding servers, but not streaming servers.

The well-known US CDNs were used for streaming.

Also, the cloud they picked doesn't matter because:

1) They used their own ASG UI, Asgard, since AWS initially didn't have one.

2) With around 1,000 engineers, they could migrate clouds at any time at a future date (or build their own CDN. There was no silo politics as in most other companies.)