
How much does Netflix spend on Amazon AWS? - gibbiv
https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-Netflix-spend-on-Amazon-AWS?share=1
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paxy
This is impossible to even ballpark without some insider info. My company for
example runs a ton of user facing services on AWS, but the vast majority of
costs come from internal data storage and processing pipelines (server logs,
analytics, BI/SI dashboards).

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Waterluvian
Since I'm a team of one working on some Amazon services for a far smaller
customer base, I get a broad slice of different technologies and problems to
solve. I can't imagine being the person whose job is to manage some slice of
the part of the stack that monitors just the billing portion of their aws
usage.

But contemplating that scale also makes me better understand how these
companies end up with hundreds of engineers to manage a product that on the
surface really doesn't do a whole lot.

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chrisco255
Are you trying to say that Netflix as a product doesn't do a whole lot?

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yeahsure
Well, there are plenty of sites hosting pirated movies that are run by a
couple of people.

At the end of the day -unless you really know how many tech/human resources
something like netflix needs- you could wrongly asume a few guys could host
the content on AWS, use a third party for billing and be done with it.

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StudentStuff
AWS is totally uncompetitive if your looking to serve video though, Amazon's
bandwidth pricing is something straight out of 1999, it is one of the largest
pieces of their moat to lock people into AWS.

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mayniac
I'm one of those people the comment above you mentioned who runs a site
hosting pirate media (it's all private before anyone asks)

Looked into AWS a while ago so I could throw some encrypted containers on it
thinking it would be cheaper. Storage on S3 would have cost about four times
as much as I'm paying now in VPS costs, and EFS (the service I actualy wanted)
about ten times as much, and that's before looking at bandwidth. Oh and I'd
still need at least one VPS to handle transcoding, content delivery etc.

I think Netflix save money by using S3 for the majority of their storage but
having their own CDN so they use less bandwidth from AWS.

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blantonl
I've got to think bandwidth is their largest expenditure... even with all the
CDN infrastructure they have in place.

AWS bandwidth is extremely expensive - regardless of the negotiated discounts
they probably get.

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jonny_eh
Netflix doesn't host any video content on AWS, none. It only serves up their
API + site.

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whoisjuan
Saying that they host none of their video content in AWS it's kind of a
stretch. The original video and encoded versions of those videos are probably
all hosted in S3. Every Netflix Open Connect Appliance still needs to copy and
update its content from somewhere and as far as I know, they do it from S3
which it's ultimately their core data lake. How often and how efficiently they
do it is probably unknown, but I can't imagine any other strategy to
distribute their video across their appliances network that doesn't involve
S3.

It's also very unlikely that they are using 'warm' storage to replicate their
content across their appliances network since the objects would be retrieved
and replicated behind the scenes (no user-facing speed required), so they
could be as well using Amazon Glacier to host their content video and just
retrieve it slowly at a fraction of S3's cost.

You can read more about Netflix Open Connect network and their storage
appliances here:
[https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/](https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/)

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alttab
$665M.

Just guessing.

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stevewilhelm
"Amazon Web Services reported sales on Thursday of $5.44 billion (for Q1
2018)" [1]

So there is your upper bound.

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/26/aws-
earnings-q1-2018.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/26/aws-
earnings-q1-2018.html)

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Alex3917
I just hope someone there is getting weekly emails like:

"Dear AWS customer:

AWS Trusted Advisor currently shows alerts for 12 checks (1 red and 11 yellow)
and $18,922,425.23 of potential monthly savings based on your usage."

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Artemis2
“AWS Free Tier limit alert”

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CyanLite2
TLDR: Netflix gives over $250mil to their competition every year.

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sn41
Is it that simple? To _replace_ AWS with in-house expertise producing
acceptable quality cloud services for Netflix, how much will Netflix have to
spend?

My guess is that it will be significantly costlier to go self-sufficient
(during something like the coming decade) considering AWS' almost 12+ year
lead on these technologies.

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Terretta
It’s not the tech. It’s the people.

If you can only get so many people, what do you want them working on?

Undifferentiated heavy lifting, or something that directly makes you better
than your competitors in your customers’ minds?

