What happens when Amazon launches their competing streaming video service? [1] Just a rumor at this point, but when a large set of content comes in-window for both Netflix and Amazon and each needs to spin up a thousand instances to transcode it? Who will get priority? [2]<p>It seems extraordinarily stupid to entrust such an obvious potential competitor with the keys to your infrastructure, particularly in a single-vendor solution.<p>This is fundamentally different from the Roku model -- neither Amazon nor Netflix own Roku, so they can remain neutral.<p>(edit: formatting)<p>[1] <a href="http://technologizer.com/2010/08/31/amazon-subscription-streaming-rumor/" rel="nofollow">http://technologizer.com/2010/08/31/amazon-subscription-stre...</a><p>[2] And don't give me any bullshit about AWS not being capacity constrained unless you routinely spin up 1000 temporary XL instances.
<i>We could have chosen to build out new data centers, build our own redundancy and failover, data synchronization systems, etc. Or, we could opt to write a check to someone else to do that instead.</i><p>If you are building almost any type of company today, it makes no sense to build your own datacenter. We're going to look back in 10-20 years and laugh that every company felt the need to build datacenters. While doing some research relating to sustainability and cloud computing, I found some statistics showing that federal agencies saved between 25-50% by moving to "cloud" solutions.<p><a href="http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2010/0407_cloud_computing_west.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2010/0407_cloud_computing_we...</a><p>Cloud computing is an excellent way for companies to dramatically lower their carbon footprint as well. Instead of using coal-fired electricity running your own inefficient datacenters, why not host your stuff at Google or Amazon where the PUE is low and they're using hydro/cleaner power?
I think what that post is trying to say is this: focus on your core competency. Amazon is good at cloud computing, Netflix is good at renting/streaming movies.<p>However, there are some cases where "core competency" is a vague term. Take Facebook for example - could they outsource their infrastructure to somebody else? Given how much data they have to handle, probably not. When you get to the point where scaling requires very low-level (Hunch) or massive (Google or Facebook) optimizations/deployments, you might be entering the business of handling intricate infrastructure yourself.
I look in on this stuff from the enterprise side of things with interest. I want to get out of the business of hosting an internal datacenter entirely as soon as possible (that decades old, and apparently intractable AS400 accounting system notwithstanding), and would prefer to move things cloudward. Right now though, it seems that we are either limited to niche players or proprietary solutions(AWS, etc.), and the risk of being held hostage by an underperforming vendor remains high. We are experimenting with certain applications (CRM, for example) being hosted in the cloud. Until there is a standard cloud-hosting platform, with multiple large players offering services that would allow us to very simply move from one service to another without redisigning major parts of applications there won't be much movement to the cloud in our space. (part of this is a legacy of horrendous application design in the enterprise space, part of it is just the natural legacy of having much older legacy applications than web companies do, and part of it is a reflection of large organizations being terribly risk averse.)
This is indeed an interesting post but it doesn't answer the question why they chose Amazon. It focuses on why they chose not to expand within their own datacenter.
I'm still apprehensive about entrusting a single party to handle all of my infrastructure. Technical and business failures occur in even the best of the hosting companies.<p>Granted, my computing needs are basic compared to the needs of Netflix.
<i>"We’re not very good at predicting customer growth or device engagement."</i><p>But they are good enough to admit that, and plan accordingly. Hat off.
Amazon has plenty of spare cycles most of the year (hence Mechanical Turk and all this excess datacenter capacity they can contract out).
- They have this b/c they need to be able to accommodate their extrmeley peaky demand (i.e. holiday shopping season!!!)
- I wonder if this means netflix streaming will be significantly for flaky in the run-up to Xmas :)