EP-2 : Netflix's Engineering Practices: A Case Study
Software Engineering Practices and tech stack used in Netflix .
Hey Everyone!
Netflix is a leader in the field of engineering, and its practices can be used by other companies to improve their own systems. Let’s get to know the tech stack and Engineering practices at Netflix.
⭐ Netflix's Chaos Engineering Approach
Netflix is a pioneer in the field of chaos engineering, which is the practice of deliberately introducing failures into a system in order to understand how it will behave under stress. Netflix has a team of dedicated chaos engineers who use a variety of techniques to inject failures into their systems.
Netflix's chaos engineering program is called Simian Army. It consists of a number of different tools that can be used to simulate different types of failures. For example, Chaos Monkey randomly terminates EC2 instances, Chaos Gorilla randomly deletes regions, and Chaos Kong randomly disconnects regions.
By understanding how their systems respond to failure, Netflix can identify and fix potential problems before they cause outages. This approach has helped Netflix to achieve an extremely high level of reliability, with an average uptime of 99.99%.
⭐ Netflix's Microservices Architecture
Netflix's architecture is based on microservices, which are small, independent services that are responsible for a specific task. This approach has several advantages, including:
* Increased flexibility: Microservices can be easily scaled up or down as needed.
* Improved reliability: If one microservice fails, the others can continue to operate.
* Easier development and maintenance: Microservices are easier to develop and maintain than monolithic applications.
Netflix's microservices architecture has helped the company to scale its operations and become one of the most successful streaming services in the world. Here is a video with wealth of insights on microservices at Netflix.
⭐ Netflix's Continuous Delivery Pipeline
Netflix has a highly automated and efficient Continuous Delivery Pipeline that allows them to deploy code to production multiple times a day. This approach has several advantages, including:
* Increased speed: New features can be released to users more quickly.
* Improved quality: Bugs are caught and fixed earlier in the development process.
* Reduced costs: There is no need to manually deploy code to production.
Netflix's continuous delivery pipeline has helped the company to release new features faster and with fewer bugs. Their pipeline consists of several stages, including code commit, build, automated testing, deployment, and monitoring.
One of the key components of their pipeline is their "Canary Analysis" system, which allows them to test new code changes on a small subset of users before rolling it out to the entire platform. This helps them catch any potential issues or bugs before they affect a large number of users.
⭐ Netflix's Recommendation Systems
Netflix has one of the most sophisticated recommendation systems in the world. It uses a variety of factors, including user ratings, watch history, and search history, to recommend movies and TV shows to users. The company has published several papers on its recommendation system, including:
* Collaborative Filtering Recommendation at Netflix (2006)
* The Netflix Prize: A Solution to the Movie Recommendation Problem (2009)
* Neural Collaborative Filtering (2015)✔ Netflix also uses a number of open-source tools to support their Continuous Delivery Pipeline, such as Spinnaker for deployment automation and Chaos Monkey for testing system resiliency.
Here are some links for further reading:
Netflix's engineering blog: https://netflixtechblog.com/
Spinnaker: https://www.spinnaker.io/
Chaos Monkey: https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey
Recommendation algorithms : https://research.netflix.com/research-area/recommendations