Quick Summary: The approach used by Netflix in DevOps focuses on a culture of collaboration and innovation, instead of adhering to a traditional DevOps framework. After a 2008 database failure, the company decided to migrate its infrastructure to cloud-native technologies via AWS, enabling the company to be scalable and focus on its product. They also would create the “Simian Army” to simulate failures and guarantee security. The combination of cloud implementation, automation and fault-tolerant architecture is key to the company’s success in maintaining high availability globally. In this case study, we will be exploring how the entertainment platform adopted DevOps taking just the foundation of its principles and prioritizing a culture of collaboration to guarantee innovation.
Despite the fact that Netflix is an entertainment service provider, it is a leading force in the tech sector, outpacing many established IT companies in terms of innovation. The company has had a profound impact on the technology industry with its flagship media streaming platform, driving new ideas from its highly renowned engineering, company culture and advancements in product development over the years. Its subscription based model, which provides a wide range of on demand TV shows and movies via the Internet, has served as a blueprint for creating other major entertainment platforms such as Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+.
Having more than 282 million subscribers over the globe in 2024, and streaming with a reach of 190 countries are the two factors making this entertainment platform the most successful streaming service globally today. Much of its accomplishments are attributed to its capability to impose reliable technologies and its unique DevOps culture, which enables immediate innovation in satisfying customer demands, also while improving user experiences.
Even though Netflix is massively successful with its reputation as an online streaming giant, the company doesn’t actually adhere to the traditional DevOps approach. You may be asking yourself ‘then how in the world did this company become the poster child of DevOps?’. In this case study, we will be delving into this question, starting with its humble beginnings as a DVD rental service.
How Netflix transitioned to Cloud-Native Technologies
Our journey started in April 1998, when Netflix first established itself as a DVD rental business. Only just a year later, the online streaming platform had altered its ‘pay-for-use’ model into a subscription model, similar to the current prototype of today. The company introduced its online streaming platform almost a decade later in 2007, altering how people spent their time for leisure activities.
The year after the establishment of its online services, however, a major database corruption was detected, which would result in their services being temporarily discontinued. This catastrophic setback, which restricted DVD shipment to a third of their 8.4 million customers, pushed the streaming giant to migrate its organization to cloud-native technologies. In order to manage this scale, the company began its transition to their cloud providers (Amazon Web Services) in 2008 and completed the process indefinitely in January 2016.
“Our journey to the cloud at Netflix began in August of 2008, when we experienced a major database corruption and for three days could not ship DVDs to our members. That is when we realized that we had to move away from vertically scaled single points of failure, like relational databases in our datacenter, towards highly reliable, horizontally scalable, distributed systems in the cloud.” – Yury Izrailevsky, Vice President of Cloud Computing and Platform Engineering, Netflix.
To explain this quote in layman’s terms, the online streaming platform learnt the hard way that dependence on one or two large machines was too risky, so by moving to cloud-native technologies, they could spread the workload across multiple machines. This would result in their systems being more reliable in their ability to handle a lot of traffic.
Netflix’s containerization strategy with Docker and Titus
Netflix utilizes Docker containers to efficiently scale and manage their vast array of applications throughout its cloud platform. Containers are lightweight and isolated environments which package an application with its dependencies, letting them run consistently and continuously across multiple infrastructures. Unlike virtual machines, containers share the same operating system, making them faster and more resource-efficient.
Millions of Docker Containers are run per week, across tens of thousands of Amazon EC2 instances, to support a variety of applications, which can range from streaming and recommendation systems to data analytics and machine learning. Flexibility from these containers enables the online streaming platform to deploy its applications much faster regardless of core network or hardware.
In order to manage this massive container workload, the entertainment platform developed Titus, its very own container management system, for the purpose of scheduling and running these batch jobs on Docker’s containers. It integrates with Amazon’s EC2 instance, enabling to schedule and allocate resources efficiently, which essentially ensures that containers are packed optimally throughout instances. This product supports load balancing, autoscaling and recovery, which makes Netflix’s cloud-native technologies platform extremely reliable and cost-effective.
By using Titus and Docker, the streaming giant has created a scalable, flexible, and efficient infrastructure, which can handle millions of containers to support the dynamic demands of its global platform.
Resilience testing with chaos engineering
Upon migrating to the cloud, Netflix had become practically immune to outages similar to the 2008 event. They still intended to be ready, however, for potential mishaps that could potentially occur, resulting in losses in the future. The engineers at the company decided the best means to reduce damage was by beating fire with fire: by failing repeatedly, in order to prevent failure from happening.
During Christmas Eve of 2012, the entertainment company experienced a partial outage which lasted for several hours, due to a fault within AWS. During that time, an hour of downtime cost the company approximately $200,000, with AWS outages also affecting other major sites. Since then, the company has built a platform capable of handling such disruptions by adopting chaos engineering. The adoption of this idea is attributed to the philosophy followed, which is: “building for failure”, by recognizing that an application will inevitably fail. Through the embracement of this reality, the entertainment company has developed proactive strategies to reduce impact, one key component of this approach is the “Simian Army” which is a suite of tools, specifically designated for testing and strengthening the stability of a platform.
One such tool is Chaos Monkey, which randomly disables production instances to make sure that the system can function smoothly in the face of unexpected failures. Chaos Monkey was the first tool created by the entertainment company, specifically for chaos engineering. It works by running a script constantly in every environment, killing production instances at random intervals as well as services in the infrastructure. This assists developers in spotting system weaknesses, developing an automatic recovery solution, testing the code in situations of failure, and building resilient systems daily.
“This was our philosophy when we built Chaos Monkey, a tool that randomly disables our production instances to make sure we can survive this common type of failure without any customer impact. The name comes from the idea of unleashing a wild monkey with a weapon in your data center (or cloud region) to randomly shoot down instances and chew through cables — all the while we continue serving our customers without interruption.” –Netflix Technology Blog.
Upon the success of Chaos Monkey, the company’s engineers expanded their resilience testing through the creation of the aforementioned Simian Army, a suite of tools made to simulate the many kinds of possible failures to ensure that the platform could handle them. Some of the tools from the Simian Army include:
- Latency monkey: Simulates service degradation through the introduction of false delays in client side communications, to test how the system handles slow or failed dependencies.
- Conformity monkey: Recognizes and removes instances which do not meet best practices, giving the opportunity for service owners to correct them.
- Doctor monkey: Monitors health checks and external indicators (such as CPU load) to find unhealthy instances, and then shuts them down upon identification of the root cause.
- Janitor Monkey: Helps keep the cloud environment clean through the identification and removal of unused resources.
- Security Monkey: Extends the role of Conformity Monkey through the detection of security violations (e.g. misconfigurations in AWS) and ensuring that SSL and DRM certificates are up to date and valid.
- 10-18 Monkey: Identifies configuration and runtime issues concerning localization and internationalization, ensuring proper operations across multiple geographic locations.
- Chaos Gorilla: Simulates an outage of an entire Amazon availability zone to test if the system can rebalance services throughout functional zones without disruption.
As of today, the streaming giant continues to leverage Chaos engineering through its Resilience Testing team, in charge of conducting chaos experiments. The Simian Army, through its emphasis on automation and quality assurance, proves to be instrumental in handling unexpected failures and reducing the impact on users.
Concluding Thoughts
In conclusion, Netflix stands as a prime example of how DevOps practices can drive success and innovation. Despite the company’s distinctive work environment which prioritizes rapid iteration and resilience testing, it is paramount to accept the fact that high stake industries such as healthcare and banking cannot afford the same amount of risk as an entertainment company. The approach followed by the entertainment company may not be suitable for every organization, especially the ones whose uptime is critical.
The streaming platform has however clearly demonstrated the advantages of following a strong DevOps culture. By automating most of its release process and fostering shared responsibility throughout teams, the streaming giant has been able to streamline development, enable rapid deployment, and perform rigorous resilience testing. Its repeating integration and deployment model has allowed for rapid innovation, letting the customer meet their demands faster.
Netflix’s success with DevOps is a valuable blueprint for organizations looking to accelerate advancements while also maintaining a high level of operational stability. At Cogent, we bring that same level of expertise and dedication to your organization, helping you streamline operations, accelerate delivery, and enhance system readability. Whether you’re looking to optimize workflows or automate infrastructure, our DevOps services are tailored to meet your unique needs.
Take the next step in your DevOps journey with Cogent IBS. Contact us today to learn how we can help you achieve a faster time to market, higher efficiency and a more reliant system. Let us unlock your team’s full potential and drive innovation together!
Written by Larisa Dsilva