[bjornlouser]

'Long release cycles: The joint deployment meant that there was increased fear of unintended production outages as debugging and rollback can be difficult for a deployment of this size. This drove the approach of the “release train”. Every two weeks, a “snapshot” of all modules was taken, and promoted to be a “release candidate”. This release candidate then went through exhaustive testing which attempted to cover as large a surface area as possible. This testing stage took about two weeks. Thus, depending on when the code change was merged, it could take anywhere between two and four weeks to reach production.'

I guess I'm just old, but I prefer the delay with a couple of weeks of testing versus pushing to prod and having the customer test the code.

[mannyv]

Netflix is a company that works with media people. You either understand what that implies or you don't.

And remember, this is the backend for video encoding. Issues in this aren't necessarily user visible.

The big benefit to their velocity is responsiveness. Apparently the backend team understands their customer and the timelines that the customer wants, and adjusted appropriately.

Just dealing with ads would have been problematic, because those tend to be straight 1080 or 4k with stereo. Nothing fancy, but I'll bet they didn't fit inside the chunk size they were expecting since ads are usually 30 seconds or less. And they don't need the dynamic encoding etc that normal titles do.

I wonder how much benefit dynamic encoding brings in space reduction?

[neilv]

> Netflix is a company that works with media people. You either understand what that implies or you don't.

It implies everyone is hopped up on drugs?

[throwaway19423]

Err .. the media people take visual quality and aesthetics very, very seriously. The Director has a vision and the tech goes to amazing lengths to support it. It is a different world as the original post said.

[mannyv]

One of the things in media is that shit happens and you get what you get on an extreme timeline and you deal with it. One month is about 29.9 days too long. Someone accidentally encoded it with a codec you don't support? Too bad, you get it done.

[atomicfiredoll]

What's interesting to me about this is that some companies seem to struggle to get even one reliable deployment process in place. In this case they were able to actively select the right process for the right job, even if it isn't the one they're normally geared toward using.

It's not necessarily anything Earth shattering, but it may be an issue at some smaller places with fewer resources.