Can anyone explain why Netflix is considered to have such high tier engineering? Just from a super high level view they store and serve ~5000 videos saved at a few different qualities (4?) so lets say a total of 20,000 videos. Those files only change when specific privileged users update them.<p>Compare that with Youtube where ~5,000 videos are uploaded, processed into different formats/qualities every minute, and can be added by anyone with an email. It seems like Netflix has a fairly trivial problem when compared with video sharing or content sharing sites.
This API is very similar to DynamoDB, which is basically a hash table of B-trees.<p>My experience is that this architecture can lead to very chatty applications if you have a rich data model (eg a graph).
For anyone looking for a TL;DR, I'd suggest starting at <a href="https://netflixtechblog.com/introducing-netflixs-key-value-data-abstraction-layer-1ea8a0a11b30#6f49" rel="nofollow">https://netflixtechblog.com/introducing-netflixs-key-value-d...</a> , which HN is truncating so you can't see it but I've directly linked to a later section in the post with a #. Up to that point it's basically "a networked HashMap<String, SortedMap<Bytes, Bytes>>". But the ability to return partial results based on a timeout with a pagination token is somewhat unusual and the next section called "Signaling" is at least worth a look.
Back in the 2000s it was common to have libraries and services which would expose high level database functions to applications rather than give them direct database access. It solved so many problems.