Netflix is making big changes to how it architects its service

Netflix said it plans to move its last remaining on-prem systems to the cloud in a move aimed at streamlining its datacentre strategy.

According to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal’s CIO Journal, while its entire customer-facing business runs on AWS, Netflix said the company is planning to completely retire its own datacentres later this summer.

While most of its internal applications also run in the public cloud the company still uses its own infrastructure to store backups of its video collection, and for persistent failover.

It is clear Netflix has until very recently continued to invest in that infrastructure. Earlier this year the video streaming giant swapped 16 existing storage systems for three XIV systems to reduce datacentre floor space used by about 80 per cent and boost its database transactions-per-minute.

It was also testing IBM’s recently announced Spectrum Storage software, which is designed to optimise storage and ease management within hybrid cloud environments.

Moving all of its systems and applications to the cloud will complement a massive architectural overhaul announced earlier this year.

The company said rising demand for its service, which is mostly deployed on AWS infrastructure from multiple locations (initially just in the US) has prompted an effort to simplify its architecture so that it can scale more rapidly and reduce outages.

“Over the past 7 years, Netflix streaming has expanded from thousands of members watching occasionally to millions of members watching over two billion hours every month.  Each time a member starts to watch a movie or TV episode, a “view” is created in our data systems and a collection of events describing that view is gathered.  Given that viewing is what members spend most of their time doing on Netflix, having a robust and scalable architecture to manage and process this data is critical to the success of our business,” the company said at the time.