[personZ]

They aren't creating all of this software just because they are having fun in their free time.

Sorry, but this is an invention of yours. No one said they're doing anything flippantly.

But they may be doing it ignorantly: Success in one field (in this case turning a mail subscription business into a stream service) doesn't imply technical innovation or leadership, and often is despite it.

This industry is absolutely rife with people creating solutions to problems they themselves invented and caused. In the case of Netflix, an enormous amount of their solutions have been founded around the notion of deploying on huge numbers of miserable Amazon EC2 instances, and then dealing with the problems related to that. Others simply deployed distributed data centers hosting their own purpose suited, reliable hardware with big fat storage arrays, and the problem is solved. It's like trying to build a car out of toothpicks and then detailing the innovations you created in toothpick redundancy and robustness.

[res0nat0r]

Sorry but this just reeks of naiveté. When the few areas of tech that I have actually been involved with in the real world come up on HN there are always comments stating that things are just so simple and why so and so is doing it wrong and why it so much easier if they just do something simplistic...

That just isn't the case in the real world when working with tens of millions of customers. This will become apparent when you actually get out there in the field and realize systems involving tens of thousands of machines hosting dozens of different services to millions of people is actually not simple.

[personZ]

Starting with a patronizing "sorry", looking down from heights, doesn't somehow give your comment more credibility.

There are a large number of services of the user scale of Netflix, with dramatically more complexity, that don't seem to have the heroic issues that Netflix does. Facebook and Reddit both are of a complexity scale multiple-magnitudes greater than Netflix. Someone else absurdly tried to draw Apple and Google in, but again, what they do absolutely dwarfs the entirety of Netflix's operation, to the point that it becomes almost laughable.

Netflix is a very simple application. Scaling it can be difficult, of course, but this is hardly some new grounds. Further, the particularly make-up of Netflix makes it one of the most profoundly scalable platforms going (silos, little to no need for transactional integrity. It is profoundly simple). You don't have to believe this, but your comically patronizing responses just sound...laughably unskilled.

[res0nat0r]

> Netflix is a very simple application. Scaling it can be difficult, of course, but this is hardly some new grounds. Further, the particularly make-up of Netflix makes it one of the most profoundly scalable platforms going (silos, little to no need for transactional integrity. It is profoundly simple). You don't have to believe this, but your comically patronizing responses just sound...laughably unskilled.

Have you actually work with any of their backend engineers, seen any of their infrastructure and why they made the design decisions they did, or actually talked to anyone at Netflix, or is this all just speculation?

I'm sure they'd love to hire you to to greatly simplify their overly complicated architecture otherwise...

[zimpenfish]

I've yet to see a developer who says "well, that's easy" about a non-trivial problem actually follow through and demonstrate it to be true. Normally because they spend 5 minutes looking at the problem and see the complexities multiply like a virus before their very eyes...

[personZ]

You state this as if I've claimed that I'm going to create a Netflix clone just to prove something, which of course is nonsense. Netflix is a large company that has been around for years, yet their solution remains relatively simple for the scale of their operation.