So this is perhaps a lame post but I'm super tired, been up since 4am. I'll try and follow up with more detail in the morning.<p>This article, in my opinion, is way off. I base that on the fact that I've been dancing with Netflix for a month, I might end up working with them to try and make NUMA machines serve up content faster. As in I'd be working on exactly what happens when you hit play.<p>My take on how Netflix serves you movies is nothing like what this article says.<p>They have servers in every ISP, the servers send a heartbeat to a conductor in AWS, the heartbeat says "I've got this content and I am this over worked", when you hit play the app reaches out the conductor and says "I want this", the conductor looks around and finds a server close to you that is not overloaded and off you go.<p>That might look easy. It's not. Take a look at this post about how they fill a 100Gbit pipe: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15367421" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15367421</a><p>I'm a kernel guy, I'm old school, I get what they are doing there, that is impressive.<p>I wish hacker news got excited about the filling the pipe post and less excited about this thread.
<i>An Amazon Web Services data center in Frankfurt, Germany, specially dedicated to CERN.</i><p>I believe this is actually the CERN computer center itself and totally unrelated with Amazon.<p><a href="http://cds.cern.ch/record/1103476" rel="nofollow">http://cds.cern.ch/record/1103476</a>
You know what, I'm going to use this post to tell you what happened last night when I hit play in firefox.<p>Nothing happened.<p>I saw The spinning loading wheel and the firefox/netflix header saying "blah blah audio video software being installed try again blah restart blah"...<p>I waited, I reloaded the page, I googled, I checked the DRM settings, I did blah blah blah.<p>Wasted time and frustrated I then opened microsoft edge and everything worked.<p>You know that firefox share is at 8% according to W3Counter? You know this kind of crap will only reduce this?<p>And then we'll only have the big daddy corporate sponsored browsers.<p>And all because users want to watch netflix.<p>What a bag of mediocre horse shit.
BTW. Netflix is in the process of transitioning to TLS (https) transport. Not because they need it for any reason, but because shady advertisers keep snooping connections and using that to profile users. Netflix is tired of being accused of selling user data. My understanding is that the movie was already encrypted, but that stream could be fingerprinted to identify which movie it was.<p>Using TLS is a lot more expensive so that costs them money, so I have to respect them for that.<p>Grandma's TV is still unencrypted, but anyone who updates their client is protected.<p>They do have to deal with a whole ton of legacy clients.
i don’t understand how microservices solves the problem of broken interfaces. if an api changes or disappears, how is that different from the locations.txt file changing or disappearing?<p>i think it’s just another instance of humans making things more complicated than they need be. Same line of reasoning Linus went with a monolith vs a micro kernel.
"A special piece of code is also added to these files to lock them with what is called digital rights management or DRM — a technological measure which prevents piracy of films."<p>They should probably update this to say "tries to prevent", as NF DRM has been long cracked.
I still believe that Netflix stack is way too complicated for what Netflix needs. It's a CDN with a recommendation engine that is completely garbage ( the 95% stuff I'm interested ). Also comparing Youtube and Netflix speed, Youtube is like 2/3x faster to load any content.