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which cdn does netflix use

by Dr. Mitchell Fadel Published 3 years ago Updated 3 years ago

Netflix Open Connect is our purpose-built Content Delivery Network (CDN) responsible for serving 100% of our video traffic.Jun 20, 2018

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Does Netflix have own CDN?

Most importantly, Netflix built its own CDN in order to have greater control over application delivery and the user experience. To provide optimal streaming media delivery to customers, Netflix needed to maximize its control over the three basic components in the delivery chain: The user's video player.

How does Netflix work CDN?

So, Netflix designed its own CDN called OpenConnect. Basically, it installs its CDN appliances in data centers of local ISPs. This pretty much isolates Netflix from everything else on the internet. Netflix has algorithms that calculate popularity locally.

Which Web server does Netflix use?

Netflix uses AWS for nearly all its computing and storage needs, including databases, analytics, recommendation engines, video transcoding, and more—hundreds of functions that in total use more than 100,000 server instances on AWS.

Does Netflix use CloudFlare?

There are quite a few different options for CDNs, and Netflix used Limelight, Level 3, and Akamai for a while. There is also CloudFront from Amazon and CloudFlare, just to name a few more.

Does Netflix use AWS?

Netflix uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) for nearly all its computing and storage needs, including databases, analytics, recommendation engines, video transcoding, and more—hundreds of functions that in total use more than 100,000 server instances on AWS.

How big is Netflix CDN?

280 terabytesAll of Netflix's content—its TV shows, movies, documentaries, and whatnot—is mirrored within its Open Connect CDN. These actually take the form of physical appliances, stuffed with up to 280 terabytes of storage.

Does Netflix use its own servers?

Netflix has servers all over the world, and will send your video stream from as close to you as possible. The shorter the route, the higher the video quality. When you hit play, Netflix uses the most efficient path possible to carry the video through our system to your ISP.

Does Netflix own its servers?

Netflix took a completely different approach to building its CDN. Netflix doesn't operate its own network; it doesn't operate its own datacenters anymore either. Instead, internet service providers (ISPs) agree to put OCAs in their datacenters.

Does Netflix leave AWS?

Netflix confirmed that it's not turning its back on AWS. “There is no change in our comprehensive relationship with AWS. We've had a few disaster recovery workloads with Google for a while and we always experiment with new technologies. There's nothing bigger here,” the company said in a statement obtained by GeekWire.

Does Netflix use CloudFront?

Yes, Netflix relies heavily on Amazon's cloud services, but not for video delivery. Netflix delivers all of their videos from their own content distribution network and doesn't use Amazon's CloudFront CDN for video delivery at all.

Does YouTube use a CDN?

pretty much everything you load from a popular web service would deliver content through a CDN. For an example, FaceBook, NetFlix and YouTube uses content delivery networks to serve the billions of users who requests data from their servers.

What CDN does Hulu use?

Both Netflix and Hulu use Akamai, Limelight, and Level3 content distribution networks (CDNs) for video content delivery. Such third-party service-based architecture can be regarded as a system de- sign blueprint by future Over-the-Top (OTT) content service providers.

What is Netflix Open Connect?

Netflix Open Connect was originally developed in 2011 (and announced in 2012) as a response to the ever-increasing scale of Netflix streaming. Since the launch of the streaming service in 2007, Netflix had proved to be a significant and increasingly large share of internet traffic in every market in which we operated. Although third-party content delivery networks were doing a great job delivering Netflix content (as well as all kinds of other content on the internet), we realized we could be much more efficient based on our knowledge of how our members use Netflix. Although the number and size of the files that make up our content library can be staggering, we are able to use sophisticated popularity models to make sure the right file is on the right server at the right time. These advanced algorithms share some common approaches, and sometimes common inputs, with our industry-leading content recommendation systems.

Why do we pre-position Netflix?

As we touched on above, pre-positioning content in this way allows us to avoid any significant utilization of internet “backbone” capacity . Take the continent of Australia, for example. All access to internet content that does not originate in Australia comes via a number of undersea cables. Rather than using this expensive undersea capacity to serve Netflix traffic, we copy each file once from our US-based transcoding repository to the storage locations within Australia. This is done during off-peak hours, when we’re not competing with other internet traffic. After each file is on the continent, it is then replicated to dozens of Open Connect servers within each ISP network.

How Does Open Connect Work?

We shared in a recent blog post that Netflix uses Amazon’s AWS “cloud” for generic, scalable computing. Essentially everything before you hit “play” happens in AWS, including all of the logic of the application interface, the content discovery and selection experience, recommendation algorithms, transcoding, etc.; we use AWS for these applications because the need for this type of computing is not unique to Netflix and we can take advantage of the ease of use and growing commoditization of the “cloud” market.

Is Netflix more energy efficient than Open Connect?

At the same time, Open Connect Appliances have become smaller and more power efficient. This means each TV show or movie that is watched by a Netflix subscriber requires less energy to power and cool a server that fits into a smaller space. In fact, our entire content serving footprint is carbon neutral, as we recently pointed out in this blog .

Is Netflix Open Connect globally distributed?

We achieve that with Netflix Open Connect, our globally distributed CDN. This map of our network gives you a sense for how much this effort has scaled in the last five years.

Is Daredevil season 2 on Netflix?

Tomorrow we'll release Season 2 of Marvel's Daredevil to 190 countries simultaneously. Netflix members all over the planet will instantly be able to stream the show on any internet-connected device. Even though millions of people around the world will be watching, there will be very little additional traffic on the “internet” because ...

Does Netflix use OCAs?

After these appliances are installed in an ISP’s data center, almost all Netflix content is served from the local OCAs rather than “upstream” from the internet. Many ISPs take advantage of this option, in addition to local network interconnection, because it reduces the amount of capacity they need to build to the rest of the internet since Netflix is no longer a significant factor in that capacity. This has the dual benefit of reducing the ISP’s cost of operation and ensuring the best possible Netflix experience for their subscribers.

What is Netflix's CDN?

In this post, we’ll discuss another core contributor to Netflix’s success: its content delivery network (CDN), Open Connect. We’re proud that NGINX runs on every Open Connect delivery appliance, playing a key role in Netflix’s ability to keep pace with the explosive growth of the video service. NGINX’s Gleb Smirnoff has worked alongside the Open Connect team for over two years, and last October at our user conference, nginx.conf2014, he explained why Netflix chose NGINX (along with FreeBSD) to power this crucial part of its business.

Why did Netflix build its own CDN?

Most importantly, Netflix built its own CDN in order to have greater control over application delivery and the user experience. To provide optimal streaming media delivery to customers, Netflix needed to maximize its control over the three basic components in the delivery chain: The user’s video player.

Why is NGINX important?

Its proven speed and stability was important because Netflix wanted to launch Open Connect as quickly as possible, without the need to tweak it just to get going. Once the CDN was up and running, Netflix was able to examine traffic patterns and fine-tune the NGINX settings.

What is NGINX Plus?

To make applications similar to Netflix easier for our commercial customers to deploy, NGINX Plus combines web serving, load balancing, content caching, and media streaming in one easy to use package.

Why is Netflix controlling the video player?

Netflix already controlled this component, because its developers write all the device-specific apps used by customers to view Netflix content.

Why is Netflix open source?

From the start, Netflix’s goal was, as Gleb puts it, to “get more and more gigabits per second from a single box.” Specifically, Netflix needed to maximize the number of subscribers each appliance could serve concurrently. The Open Connect engineers anticipated needing to fine-tune the software to achieve this goal, so they decided to go with open source software for its unlimited extensibility.

What was the CDN vendor struggling to expand?

From a practical perspective, the CDN vendors were struggling to expand their infrastructure at a pace that matched the growth in customer demand for Netflix’s video streaming.

What is Netflix good at?

What Netflix was good at was delivering video to their members. Netflix would rather concentrate on getting better at delivering video rather than getting better at building datacenters.

Why did Netflix move to AWS?

Netflix moved to AWS because they needed a more reliable infrastructure for their control plane than they could build themselves. Serving video is what Netflix wants to spend time on, not on building datacenters.

How often does Netflix refresh?

Netflix refreshes its hardware design about once a year with the latest drives and low-power Intel processors. It loads the servers with movies and TV shows before it ships them out, because even over high-speed networks it takes time to load 100TB of content remotely.

How long did it take Netflix to move to AWS?

It took more than eight years for Netflix to complete the process of moving from their own datacenters to AWS. During that period Netflix grew its number of streaming customers eightfold. Netflix now runs on several hundred thousand EC2 instances.

How many hours does Netflix stream?

That means, that Netflix content is streamed 1.4*117,000,000 hours per day , which comes to 163,800,000 hours per day or 1,178,100,000 hours per week. Let’s look at the streaming size per minute. When watching in standard 360p, the computer streams about 250MB per hour, or 4.2MB per minute.

Is Netflix more reliable than AWS?

Netflix is more reliable in AWS. And this may surprise a lot of people, but AWS is cheaper for Netflix. The cloud costs per streaming view ended up being a fraction of the cost of its old datacenters.

Is Netflix open source?

Netflix, indirectly, has allowed others to show the feasibility of switching IaaS providers. This is possible due to Netflix's use of open source for key runtime aspects of their cloud platform ( Netflix Open Source Software Center ). While other companies openly discuss their technology through tech blogs and research papers, Netflix leads in not only discussing openly their technology but also open sourcing the implementations.

Our Tests: How Much Data Does Netflix Use for Different Video Qualities?

To test Netflix’s data usage, we dug in with some streaming bitrate tests that Netflix makes available. These videos, called Test Patterns on Netflix, are sorted by resolution and frames per second (fps), and display the current bitrate—which directly translates to real-world throughput—in the upper right corner.

How to Fine Tune Your Resolution and Data Usage

Here’s the problem: If you use the “High” setting, Netflix will stream at the highest possible resolution available to your TV. But if you have a 4K TV, that’s a lot of data—up to 7GB per hour! If you want to use less than that, Netflix basically makes you drop all the way down to standard definition with the “Medium” setting, which isn’t ideal.

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