On-demand entertainment company
Netflix has completed its transition to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud. Netflix, which has headquarters in Los Gatos, California, United States, streams movies and TV series to around 75 million subscribers worldwide. In January the company announced the availability of its services in 130 new countries. The company’s entire activity has been moved from data center-based infrastructure to a 100% cloud infrastructure. Completion of Netflix moving to the cloud has had a positive impact on its stock with an immediate 1.90% increase as soon as the news was announced.
While the bulk of Netflix’s services have been available through the cloud for quite a while, the complete transition of its services to the cloud is significant in that it has taken the company seven years to achieve. The move to the cloud was certainly a precursor for its recent aggressive expansion, and the company has experienced an eightfold increase on the number of subscribers that started using its services in 2008. Despite this increase in customer base, the company’s move to AWS’ cloud has actually brought its operating costs down because it has been able to jettison data center maintenance costs.
“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,” explained Yury Izrailevsky, Vice President, Cloud and Platform Engineering on the company’s blog. “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. We chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as our cloud provider because it provided us with the greatest scale and the broadest set of services and features”.
Do you know of any other major companies that have move 100% to the cloud? Let us know the details. Add your comments below.
