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0 pointsAnnatar8y ago0 comments

Netflix has an army of professional system and kernel engineers who optimize and engineer the OSes they run on; they just use AWS for virtual machine and datacenter capacity.

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scarface748y ago· 2 in thread

They use a lot of AWS services - not just virtual machines

- First they use Ubuntu Linux

- SES (Email)

- ElasticSearch (AWS has their own managed version)

- SQS (queueing system)

- S3 (storage)

-auto scaling

Most of the optimization's they do are standard things at scale where they are tuning by measuring performance.

https://youtu.be/89fYOo1V2pA

and the slide deck from the presentation.

https://www.slideshare.net/brendangregg/how-netflix-tunes-ec...

But that's even more of a reason to choose AWS, Netflix has open sourced dozens of tools specifically related to AWS. You get to take advantage of their tools and knowledge.

AnnatarOP8y ago

So if anything, they are not running “serverless”, far from it: they really dig their hands into the OS and system engineering. Just recently they did kernel engineering on FreeBSD to push the networking as close to 100 Gbps per interface as possible. You picked a bad example to make your point, a point which I do not, from experience of doing this for several decades, recognize as valid anyway.

By the by, I’m that guy who runs a private datacenter in the basement, from designing one’s own rack mountable servers to crimping the network cables and running the fiber. Infrastructure is not something one should entrust to others, because these others cannot be trusted, as has been proven by AWS outages time and time again. And yes, I system engineer my own operating system as well. Well I did, it’s all been running automatically for years now.

scarface748y ago

You were making a point about people should run their own data centers. Netflix is not running their own data centers. Can you run your own data center in 90 areas around the world? Can you run your own globally distributed CDN? Your own globally distributed DNS? Are you saying that you never had any downtime? Can you stand up a replica of your object store, your caching and your database in both Europe and Asia so it can be closer to your outsourced developers and foreign customers? Does your data center in your basement allow me to set up subnets that span regions (not AWS “regions”, geographic areas - “Availability Zones”) just in case your basement floods?

What if I don't want a replica of data, what if I want to duplicate my entire infrastructure in Asia so the developers there can have a clone of our infrastructure - databases, storage, VMs, load balancers, multiple availability zones, etc. How long would it take you to do that? I could do it with a JSON script and run a command.

How fast can you provision a half dozen load balancers and five or ten dedicated computers - not VMs “dedicated hosts”? I can do it by creating a JSON file and running one command from my terminal.

And why should I trust you to set up a more reliable, redundant, network than AWS? Again Netflix didn’t trust themselves to create more reliable infrastructure and decided to trust a competitor to do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” and the guy who lead the transition is now a VP at AWS, so I think he knows something about infrastructure.

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