On-demand internet streaming service
Netflix has closed doors on its last data center and moved almost entirely to the cloud. The company, which was established in 1997, has headquarters in Los Gatos, California, USA. Netflix is a globally recognized brand with services in North America, Australia, New Zealand, South America and some locations in Europe. Its move is part of an ongoing strategy to transition its technology capability to third-party providers. The bulk of the company's data center capability is now managed by Amazon cloud data centers, alongside some Internet service providers.
While much of the company's business activity (accounting, etc.) is driven through web-based applications, its streaming activity is primarily managed by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The move is a response to the company's 2008 system failure that left a large number of Netflix's customers without a service. Since then, the company has steadily migrated services to the cloud.
Netflix streaming service launched 2007 and now has 60 million customer viewing 10 billion streaming hours of content globally. AWS offers Netflix "global scale, hosting tens of thousands of virtual instances and many petabytes of data across several cloud regions". AWS' virtual servers scale up or down depending on demand. Amazon also offers Netflix dedicated hardware. “For our streaming business, we have been 100% cloud-based for customer facing systems for some time now, and are planning to completely retire our data centers later this summer,” explained Netflix in The Wall Street Journal's CIO Journal blog.
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