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The journey began when Netflix decided to move from its own data centres to the public cloud.
In 2008, Netflix was running relational databases in its own data centres when disaster struck. A data centre failure shut the entire service down and stopped DVD shipments for three days.
The company's owners faced a choice: turn Netflix into a world-class data centre operations company or move the service to the public cloud.
Netflix was growing fast. The thousands of videos and tens of millions of customers was already generating an enormous quantity of data.
The company would struggle to rack the servers in their own data centres fast enough to handle the ever-growing volumes, but the cloud would let them add thousands of virtual servers and petabytes of storage within minutes.
A migration to the cloud was the clear choice. They soon became a poster child customer for Amazon Web Services (AWS), choosing the company for its scale and broad set of services and features.
The move would require a complete rearchitecting of the company's traditional infrastructure though. They could have forklifted all of their monolithic enterprise systems out of the data centre and dropped them into AWS, but this would only have brought all of their old data centre problems to the cloud.
Instead, they chose to rebuild the Netflix technology in AWS and fundamentally change the way that the company operated.
"Software's like anything else; if you can design it for the environment that it's going to be living in it will do more of the things you want it to do, more often and more regularly," said Hahn. "So we chose to move to micro-services."
This made the infrastructure much more agile by breaking aspects of the service up into multiple micro-services, managed by their own small teams who understood how their service worked and interacted with other systems. This was pretty groundbreaking at the time.
This provides clear, specific insights that make it easier to change the service, which leads to smaller and faster deployments. It also allows them to isolate services to understand the various performance profiles, patterns and securities in each micro-service, and move away from any individual piece that's causing a...
"I don't have to assemble all of these pieces built by other people in order to have a singular deployment," said Hahn. "Any Netflix service team can deploy their service at any time. It requires no coordination, no scheduling, no crucible to get to production."
It took Netflix seven years to complete the migration to the cloud. In 2016, the last remaining data centres used by the streaming service were shut down.
In its place was a new cloud infrastructure running all of Netflix's computing and storage needs, from customer information to recommendation algorithms.
The migration improved Netflix's scalability and service availability and the velocity by which the company could release new content, features, interfaces and interactions. It also freed up the capacity of engineers, cut the costs of streaming, drastically improved availability and added the experience and expertise o...
"The other thing is that the cost model is really nice for us," added Hahn. "You pay for what you use. That allows us to do a lot of experimentations."
This gives them greater freedom to test new features and improve existing ones, such as the rows of content recommendations that are personalised every day.
"These large recommendation algorithms require a lot of compute work," Hahn explained. "If I want to find out if a new one we're playing with does better, I don't want to turn off the old one, because you still need recommendations.
"I can now spin up an entirely new set of machines in the tens, or hundreds or thousands in an afternoon and chunk through my data and see if we've done better, and I only pay for the portions I use. It allows us an amazing amount of freedom in experimentation."
The cloud is only one part of the Netflix user experience. Everything that happens before they hit play takes place in AWS, but the video content that follows comes from a separate system: Netflix OpenConnect, the company's proprietary content delivery network (CDN). The OpenConnect appliances store the video content a...
CDNs are designed to deliver internet-based content to viewers by bringing it closer to where they're watching. Netflix originally outsourced streaming video delivery to third-party CDN suppliers, but as the company grew, these vendors struggled to support the traffic. Netflix needed more control over the service and u...
The company decided to design a CDN tailored to its needs.
It now installs OpenConnect appliances that store and deliver content inside local Internet Service Provider (ISP) data centres, which isolates the Netflix service from the wider internet.
Popularity algorithms and storage techniques help distribute the content in ways that maximise offload efficiency. The system reduces the demand on upstream network capacity and helps Netflix work more closely with the ISP networks that host its traffic.
"We designed OpenConnect caching boxes to hold our content, and wherever we can we install them inside of your internet service provider's network, so that when you see those video bits you aren't actually transiting off of your operator's network," said Hahn.
The new system cut the appearances of the loathed buffering wheel by an order of magnitudes. It also allowed Netflix to make the CDN software more intelligent.
Now, whenever a customer presses play their device can get its content from numerous places on the internet.
The investment paid off when a fire in an ISP data centre in Brazil burned down Netflix's entire stack of machines. Customers who had been streaming from the ISP didn't experience any change in their user experience.
"Their devices already knew somewhere else to go get the data," said Hahn. "It didn't interrupt even one frame of streaming, when we literally burned down the base."
Netflix developers are well known these days for their unique approach to engineering culture. A self-service chaos engineering tool called the Chaos Automation Platform was pioneered to test problems in their production environments so they can be sure that their software will behave as they want during a failure.
"People press the play button on Netflix thousands of times a second," said Hahn. "If the systems cannot auto recover, if they cannot handle bad situations, if they cannot self-repair, by the time I get a human involved, in the best-case scenario, minutes have gone by.
"You can get an idea of how many of our customers we've disappointed in the three or four or five minutes it may take to get a human involved, and in the right place and working. Chaos engineering is an excellent inoculation to failures."
They use the chaos engineering method to ensure Netflix can survive a failure in one of three AWS regions it uses. Every month, they turn off one of the regions and test that they can move all of the customers that it was serving to another one within six minutes.
To embrace chaos without causing destruction, Netflix had to create a corporate culture that supported such ideas.
The central principles were formalised in the 127-slide Netflix Culture Deck, which Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said "may well be the most important document ever to come out of the Valley".
A central tenet of the policy is balancing freedom with responsibility. Teams are given ownership of their micro-service and encouraged to act independently but not recklessly.
"Netflix managers do not set out tasks for their employees to do or design their projects," said Hahn. "Their job is to give them the appropriate context so they can make the decisions, to hire excellent, stunning colleagues for them to work with, and to stay out of their way."
The company avoids making too many rules beyond a set of fundamental principles such as never touching customer data. Hahn describes the approach as building guardrails but not gates, and claims he can count on one hand the number of times he's had to tell an engineer exactly what to do.
"By making sure that that context is widely and regularly shared I can have someone design a billing system, someone else working on algorithmic systems, SREs on our reliability teams, and somebody else working on customer service, and they'll understand the same context and march towards the same goals," he said.
"That allows us to keep those teams loosely covered. We don't have lots of structures and controls, but we keep them highly aligned."
The twins, nicknamed EVE and WALL-E after characters from a Pixar film, served as communications relays during the InSight's Mars landing, beaming back data at each stage of its descent to the Martian surface in near-real time, along with InSight's first image.
A team led by scientists at Nasa's JPL and Caltech in the US has calculated that if liquid water exists on Mars, it could - under specific conditions - contain more oxygen than previously thought possible. The findings could inform future missions to Mars by providing better targets to rovers searching for signs of pas...
The Curiosity rover, which has been studying Martian soil at Gale Crater, is expected to remain largely unaffected by the dust. While Opportunity is powered by sunlight, which is blotted out by dust at its current location, Curiosity has a nuclear-powered battery that runs day and night.
Drilling is a vitally important part of Curiosity's capabilities to study Mars. Inside the rover are two laboratories that are able to conduct chemical and mineralogical analyses of rock and soil samples. The samples are acquired from Gale Crater, which the rover has been exploring since 2012.
Engineers have been working for the past year to restore the rover's full drilling capabilities, which were hampered in 2016 due to a mechanical problem, NASA said in a statement. The new version of FED adds a hammering force to the drill bit.
NASA's first mini satellites to travel into deep space have beamed back an image of the Earth and the Moon, which appear as a 'pale blue dot' and a tiny white speck floating in space.
Sergeant Bluff, IA (KTIV)- The Sergeant Bluff- Luton School District is offering tours and open houses of their buildings so voters can see what improvements need to be made to the school district.
These improvements will be part of a bond that the public will vote on.
This is the third time those in the district have voted on plans.
Sergeant Bluff- Luton Superintendent Rod Earleywine says the bond would be anywhere between $60-62 million.
This would include improvements for all schools in the district and could include building a new high school.
Plans will be presented to the board of education in October.
“It seems like everybody keeps coming to the same conclusion, that the plan presented is the best plan for the future of our school district and, involves all of our students and all of our buildings and, we just feel that is the right direction to go,” says Earleywine.
An open house will be held from 5-8 p.m. Thursday.
There will be another tour at 11 a.m. Friday at the Sergeant Bluff- Luton Primary School.
John Burns has an article in today's New York Times basically making it clear how untenable the U.S. position in Iraq has become. Super-hack Andy McCarthy links to the article only to use it as a pretext for grinding axes against other unnamed Times reporters he doesn't like. Jonah Goldberg, by contrast, at least ackno...
The article itself, of course, doesn't strike me as especially depressing. What's depressing is the situation in Iraq. We've finally reached a point where Bush administration officials see that what's needed is some kind of political reconciliation with Sunni Arab groups, but there's no particular willingness on the pa...
Objective facts aside, what gives me pause in Burns' piece is that the administration officials he's talking to seem to me to be overpersonalizing the problem. As if, in their eyes, the issue here is Nouri al-Maliki and things might be much better if he just shaped up or was replaced with someone better. This sort of t...
The complaints currently being registered against Maliki, meanwhile, are identical in all respects to the ones that were being made about his predecessor, Ibrahim Jafari. And, of course, when Jafari first came in we were treated to tons of optimism that he was the right man for the job and things were quickly going to ...
Now Maliki turns out to be inadequate, and one keeps hearing trial balloons about a US-sponsored coup.
The problem, though, isn't with Maliki or with Jafari but with the structure of the situation. Nobody holding that office is going to be able to stay in office if he does what the Americans want him to do. There's no meaningful social basis of support in Iraq for the Bush administration's agenda, and as best I can tell...
AS THE countdown to Mother's Day continues, the sight of dads flanked by littlies dashing around the shops to find a suitable gift for the woman of the house is becoming more and more common.
One of the most popular places to find a treasured Mother's Day gift is, of course, the jewellery store and Hitchcock's Fine Jewellery owner Jan Paulsen said kids were getting prepared early this year.
"We've had people coming in looking for Mother's Day gifts for a couple of weeks," Ms Paulsen said.
"You get kids of all ages, right from the littlies to the adults."
Ms Paulsen said Thursday night and Saturday morning were common buying times.
"It's interesting when you get the dads coming in with two or three kids and all the kids want different things," she said.
"It's lovely to see the dad shopping with the kids, though."
Ms Paulsen said earrings and watches topped the list of most popular jewellery for Mother's Day.
"The charms like the Thomas Sabo and Chamilia are really popular," she said.
"People looking for something for the older mothers, like our big range of novelty brooches."
Mums tired of gifts they might not want are taking matters into their own hands, using wish lists or requesting gift vouchers.
"The vouchers are really popular," Ms Paulsen said.
And while it seems that many Bundy mums are in for a treat, a new national survey shows Mother's Day is not necessarily a day of happiness for some mums.
The survey, conducted by P&O Cruises, showed two thirds of Australian mums are still expected to do household chores and cook on May 12.
When asked if they were treated to breakfast in bed, a romantic dinner or relief from household chores on Mother's Day, nearly half the mums surveyed said no.
And when it comes to unwanted gifts, 64% of mums said they would put it somewhere they'd never have to see it again and 5% said they'd sell it on eBay and use the proceeds to buy something they wanted.
Lot in the high end subdivision The Summit located close to Tracy Marina on Norfork Lake, approximately 7 miles to town. Lot 37 has possible lake view from home, additional lots 27 & 28 are adjoining corner lots see MLS 116656. This property is located in Mountain Home, Baxter County, AR.
GREAT BUILDING LOT LOCATED IN PEBBLECREEK SUBDIVISION. 1.10 ACRES M/L, CITY WATER AVAILABLE, UNDERGROUND UTILITIES, PAVED ROAD, LOVELY HOMES IN AREA. DOGWOOD TREES HAVE BEEN TAGGED, CORNERS MARKED ON LEFT SIDE OF LOT. This lot has been perked!
Pop Warner coaches constantly drill the words "two hands" into the ears of their wide receivers, hoping to train grade-schoolers to properly catch a football. Sometimes the youngsters get the hang of it, other times not.
That's how you catch it with two hands, kids. (But please, do not swallow the objects of whatever game you're playing.) Swift then posted a message explaining she and her cat were reenacting an interception by Seattle Seahawks cornerback Jeremy Lane near the end of the first quarter.
Check out the time-stamp on the post—mere minutes after Lane's play. Now that's real-time marketing.
In our weekly Adweek/Shareablee branded Instagram video chart, we've already noted that Swift has mad social media skills. But the 1.2 million likes and comments her kitty clip generated was her best effort, statistically, that we've observed.
In the multimedia infographic below, we feature eight categories (auto, beauty, consumer electronics, retail, fashion, celebrity, sports leagues and TV shows), which regularly appear in our weekly chart. Two wildcard niches are always added in, and we've chosen movies and pro sports teams for this week's edition.
Marketers for the R-rated film Fifty Shades of Grey and TV program Ellen joined Swift as notable performers from Feb. 1 through Feb. 7.
Check out all the winning work.
The TheJobNetwork Sites contain links to third party Web sites. These links are provided solely as a convenience to you and not as an endorsement by PandoLogic of the contents on such third-party Web sites. PandoLogic is not responsible for the content of linked third-party sites and does not make any representations r...
Activists protesting against mining activities in the Congo bombarded Intel's Facebook page yesterday demanding that the chip giant address the issue of 'conflict minerals'.
Things got so chaotic at one stage that Intel had to take the page down, but it's here now, with only offensive comments removed.
The chip maker has been hit with a campaign designed to get it to support a congressional bill that seeks to restrict the importation of 'conflict minerals' from the Congo.
A typical message reads: "Intel, make us proud by actively supporting the Conflict Minerals Trade Act (H.R. 4128). You are an industry leader, and an example in many ways. Real innovation means doing things better the right way. Clearly, people are following your actions closely."
Conflict in the Conga is fuelled by the battle over resources, not least valuable minerals used in the production of silicon chips and other IT goods. Intel is a major consumer of such materials.
The Facebook bombardment kicked off on Tuesday, leading Intel to eventually shut down the discussion. "We are in the process of creating a place for this type of discussion and we will share the link of this page as soon as we have it," a spokesman said.
The chip giant quickly came to the conclusion that this was a major PR gaffe and re-opened the page to comments, with only 'offensive' postings being removed.
Intel addressed the issue with a blog post. Suzanne Fallender, Intel’s corporate responsibility spinnerette said: "There has been on-going communication over the last several days about Intel’s position on legislation regarding conflict minerals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
She said the chip maker has been talking with NGOs and other in the IT business "focused on creating workable solutions"
She reiterated an Intel statement on the matter which reads: "Intel shares the deep concern of many Americans about conflict minerals. Activities related to obtaining minerals that fuel conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are unacceptable.
"We are actively engaged in efforts to identify a solution through our supply chain and together with our industry. We appreciate the recognition of the leadership actions we have taken on this issue to date. We also support the objective of US legislation to address this problem. We want to be certain that the legisla...
"We are working with industry partners, organisations, and Congressional offices to address this. In the meantime, we are not waiting for legislation to continue to drive action in our own supply chain and with our industry. We have offered to schedule a meeting to discuss this issue and will ensure that the appropriat...
A major IRC survey found that 5.4 million people have died from war-related causes in Congo since 1998 – the world’s deadliest documented conflict since WW II.

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