This comes from both first-hand experience of talking to several of their directors when consulted upon on how to make certain systems of theirs better.
It's not just a matter of guarantees, it's a matter of complexity.
Like right now Google search is dying and there's nothing that they can do to fix it because they have given up control.
The same thing happened with Netflix where they wanted to push too hard to be a tech company and have their tech blogs filled with interesting things.
On the back end they went too deep on the microservices complexity. And on the front end for a long time they suffered with their whole RxJS problem.
So it's not an objective matter of what's better. It's more cultural problem at Netflix. Plus the fact that they want to be associated with "Faang" and yet their product is not really technology based.
"Microservices" have nothing to do with it.
Netflix regularly puts out blog articles proudly proclaiming that they process exabytes of logs per microsecond or whatever it is that their microservices Rube Goldberg machine spits out these days, patting themselves on the back for a heroic job well done.
Meanwhile, I've been able to go on the same rant year after year that they're still unable to publish more than five subtitle languages per region. These are 40 KB files! They had an employee argue with me about this in another forum, saying that the distribution of these files is "harder than I thought".
It's not hard!
They're solving the wrong problems. The problems they're solving are fun for engineers, but pointless for the business or their customers.
From a customer perspective Netflix is either treading water or noticeably getting worse. Their catalog is smaller than it was. They've lost licensing deals for movies and series that I want to watch. The series they're producing themselves are not things I want to watch any more. They removed content ratings, so I can't even pick something that is good without using my phone to look up each title manually!
Microservices solve none of these issues (or make it worse), yet this is all we hear about when Netflix comes up in technology discussions. I've only ever read one article that is actually relevant to their core business of streaming video, which was a blog about using kTLS in BSD to stream directly from the SSD to the NIC and bypassing the CPU. Even that is questionable! They do this to enable HTTPS... which they don't need! They could have just used a cryptographic signature on their static content, which the clients can verify with the same level of assurance as HTTPS. Many other large content distribution networks do this.
It's 100% certain that someone could pretend to be Elon, fire 200-500 staff from the various Netflix microservices teams and then hire just one junior tech to figure out how to distribute subtitles... and that would materially improve customer retention while cutting costs with no downside whatsoever.
Every tech company massively inflated their headcount during the leadup to the Twitter acquisition because money was free.
I interviewed at Meta in 2021 and asked an EM what he would do if given a magic wand to fix one problem at the company. His response: "I would instantly hire 10,000 more engineers."
Elon famously did the opposite and now revenue is down 80%.
Subtitles are also complicated because you have to deal with different media player frameworks on the +40 different players you deal with. Getting those players, which you may not own, to recognise multiple sub tracks can be a PITA.
Things look simple to a junior developer, but those experience in building streaming platforms at scale know there are dragons when you get into the implementation. Sometimes developers and architects do over complicate things, but smart leaders avoid writing code, so its an assumption to say things are being made over complicated.
You lost me. Netflix built a massive CDN, a recommendation engine, did dynamic transcoding of video, and a bunch of other things, at scale, quite some years before everyone else. They may have enshittified in the last five years, but I dont see any reason why they dont have a genuinely legitimate claim to being a founder member of the FAANG club.
I have a much harder time believing that companies with AI in their name or domain are doing any kind of AI, by contrast.
Can you explain where this is relevant to buffering issues?
Also, you are very wrong regarding failure modes. The larger the service, the more failure modes it has. Moreover, in monoliths if a failure mode can take down/degrade the whole service, all other features are taken down/degraded. Is having a single failure mode that brings down the whole service what you call fewer points of failure?
That’s service would technically be a “microservice” even if it is a large service.
I’m genuinely curious about the reasoning behind that statement. It’s very possible that you are using a different set of assumptions or definitions than I am.
