Netflix Selects Amazon Web Services To Power Mission-Critical Technology Infrastructure

Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon.com company, (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced that Netflix, Inc., has chosen AWS to run a variety of mission-critical, customer-facing and backend applications. While letting Amazon Web Services do the worrying about the technology infrastructure, Netflix continues to improve its members’ overall experience of instantly watching TV episodes and movies on the TV and computer, and receiving DVDs by mail.

Netflix has been actively using AWS for more than a year for both customer-facing and backend applications. Now, Netflix is significantly expanding the set of applications that it is migrating from its existing technology infrastructure onto AWS. Netflix members’ movie lists, website search, movie transcoding, recommendation system and more will all be powered by AWS, representing many of the most critical pieces of the Netflix technology infrastructure.

“At Netflix, our members want the greatest convenience, selection and value. We’re excited about using AWS because it lets us focus on innovation that enables a great member experience, without requiring us to devote time and energy to building undifferentiated data centers,” said Kevin McEntee, Netflix Vice President of Engineering.

With AWS, Netflix will reap the benefits of running its infrastructure in the cloud, including the ability to add or shed resources as quickly as it wishes, freeing up scarce engineering resources from the undifferentiated heavy lifting of running its own infrastructure — all without sacrificing operational performance, reliability or security.

Netflix is leveraging many different AWS services today for a variety of mission-critical workloads, including:

• Delivering content to members faster and on more devices: Netflix is utilizing the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to transcode and store the movie subscription service’s growing movie content library for delivery on new platforms, including the Nintendo Wii and the Apple iPad. The flexibility and scalability of AWS allows Netflix to utilize vast numbers of servers to transcode and store TV episodes and movies into new formats quickly, and AWS pay-as-you-go pricing ensures that Netflix pays only for resources used. Netflix can do all of this without being exposed to the costs and burden of maintaining large amounts of infrastructure that go underutilized.
• Maintaining a highly available and resilient member-facing website: Netflix runs several of its website application functions on AWS, and is rapidly migrating more of these components to AWS. The important functions migrating to AWS include the delivery of movie and member metadata within the Netflix website. Using this data, Netflix is able to continue developing a more accurate recommendation engine, ensuring that Netflix members receive the TV episodes and movies they want, when they want them.
• Analyzing data to improve streaming quality: Netflix is using Amazon Elastic Map Reduce to analyze streaming sessions and extract business metrics around performance, viewing patterns and more, which enables Netflix to continue to improve the quality of streaming.

“By providing easy-to-use technology building blocks, AWS has enabled us to build for increased resiliency and massive scaling of our applications,” McEntee said. “AWS is core to our ability to quickly innovate and deliver better service for our customers.”

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