
Netflix to Shut Down Last Datacenter - electic
http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2015/08/13/netflix-to-pull-plug-on-final-data-center/
======
anotherangrydev
Do you think they have a special deal w/ Amazon? Otherwise I imagine that's a
really expensive bill.

Do you think they're doing it because its cheaper when you account for things
at a larger scale? Like, reduced liabilities, payrolls, CapEx, whatever? Or is
it more expensive but still "easier" and they go with it?

I really REALLY would like to hear everything from everyone about this,
because right now I'm facing that decision for my company. I'm not as big as
Netflix obv, but it is a big deal for me. It is really attractive to have all
the scale you need at will and forget about maintenance at all; even if it is
more expensive I would gladly pay as much as double my operating costs if I
can rest easily at night. I would even eat as much as 10%-20% of my profits if
I don't have to deal with that.

But the devil is in the details, I think is relatively easier to go full-cloud
than to later find out it was a mistake and try to migrate back to your
private premises. So, what could be the downsides of going full-cloud just as
Netflix did? Also, taking into account that I'm not a personal friend of Bezos
neither another Netflix, I would be just another smallish guy and I'm pretty
sure that won't get me all the perks that come with the former.

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p1esk
The question is, do you need as much elasticity as Netflix does?

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anotherangrydev
Not like in "I had a surge in traffic of millions of visitors"

But yes like in "Some hardware failed, but yeah that's not my problem
anymore!"

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p1esk
Sorry, I don't get it - why would you consider using cloud servers if you
don't have significant spikes in your traffic?

Regarding hardware failures - it's not that hard to arrange proper
redundancies in your systems, and it will certainly be cheaper than
outsourcing it to Amazon. Cloud only becomes cost effective when your spikes
are several times larger than your normal traffic, and you must maintain good
QoS at all times.

~~~
adventured
Because sometimes cloud servers are very cost effective, easy, and fast to
deploy: Digital Ocean for example.

$40 / month for 4gb of ram, 4tb of transfer, and two cores, is very cost
effective. Linode is also very reasonable.

If all I need is that scale of computing, what should I use instead that makes
sense other than cloud services? Setting up colo or a dedicated box for that
would be more expensive and a much larger hassle.

~~~
pfg
Arguably, Digital Ocean is more like a regular hosting provider with better
onboarding. Plenty of hosters offer comparable infrastructure for the same
price (you can even get something dedicated).

They're also far cheaper than AWS, where you pay a premium for the elasticity
and access to the ecosystem. If there's anything to compare AWS with, it would
be Google Cloud Platform, Azure and maybe Rackspace.

~~~
illumen
Digital Ocean is comparable to EC2. But AWS does LOTS more.

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probdist
Netflix is still running its own CDNs / using CDNs outside of Amazon.

"The company, which competes with Amazon in the video-streaming business,
elected to keep control of its own content delivery network."

So Netflix is still probably doing the bulk of their traffic themselves.
Application servers with AWS is probably not a huge bill versus massive video
traffic.

~~~
oldgregg
Fascinating. I bet they are running their own CDN to prevent Amazon from
having full access to their traffic volume/streaming demand. Would be huge
competitive advantage for amazon streaming if they could see per-title demand.

~~~
rcaught
No, it would be due to the sophisticated peering agreements -
[https://openconnect.netflix.com/](https://openconnect.netflix.com/)

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Animats
This is very strange. Amazon is in the pay per view streaming video business
itself.[1] Netflix is outsourcing their entire business to a direct
competitor. At what point will Amazon decide that they don't need Netflix?

Or perhaps there's an acquisition or merger coming.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Prime-Instant-
Video/b?node=2676882011](http://www.amazon.com/Prime-Instant-
Video/b?node=2676882011)

~~~
icebraining
_At what point will Amazon decide that they don 't need Netflix?_

And do what? "We'll jack up the prices if you compete with us" is not good
publicity.

Besides, it's not that uncommon. For example, the next iPhone will have a CPU
from Samsung.

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function_seven
> But many companies still run sensitive software in their data centers or _in
> private clouds_ , in which a company has dedicated cloud resources from a
> third-party _or within its own premises_.

(Emphasis mine)

Ok, honest question: If I have a "private cloud" on my own premises, how is
that not a data center?

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JoshTriplett
> If I have a "private cloud" on my own premises, how is that not a data
> center?

It is, but "private cloud" on top of that implies a lot more about how you run
that datacenter: using virtual machines, abstracting hardware, using APIs to
manage servers and storage (ideally the same APIs that would let you just as
easily run on someone else's cloud infrastructure), and otherwise trying to
minimize your reliance on any particular piece of hardware.

~~~
function_seven
Thanks. I was looking at it from the power, cooling, and square-footage
perspective—didn't even consider the sysadmin portion—but I see the massive
savings that could be had by uncoupling metal pizza boxes and one-off hardware
requirements from the applications that run on them

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fiberoptick
I've never understood why so many companies are comfortable giving Amazon such
leverage over their business infrastructure.

Could someone explain why this is a good move in spite of the risk that Amazon
could jack their prices up in the future?

~~~
function_seven
Total guess on my part, but I'd imagine Netflix has locked-in long-term
pricing. Of course, there's the opposite danger of the rest of the world
getting cheaper...

~~~
Wingman4l7
Reminds me of how airlines have been bitten in the butt with a similar future-
speculation method that they use to purchase fuel.

~~~
ranman
Except that this isn't fuel... the prices have consistently trended down for 7
years and have no indications of stopping.

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Aissen
From my understanding this is a simple decision: do not focus on something
that isn't your core business. Amazon is doing it well, Microsoft is, the
cloud is becoming more competitive every day, and they're big enough not to
use the public pricing, so it's even more economical for them.

In addition to this, they only need a few "machines"
([https://openconnect.netflix.com/hardware/](https://openconnect.netflix.com/hardware/))
to have full ISP-local caches of Netflix; why bother with a full datacenter ?

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tzakrajs
Feeling dejavu on this announcement.

"By the end of next year Reed aims to be 100% on AWS and to be the biggest
business entirely hosted on AWS apart from Amazon Retail."

Source: [http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/12/aws-reinvent-was-
awesome...](http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/12/aws-reinvent-was-
awesome.html?m=1)

------
merb
People on HN just don't understand that the Basic Hosting company won't give a
scalable Network for free. And with scalable Network I mean a Physical /
Virtual Network where you could connect / disconnect Nodes and connect it with
arbitrary Networks. And that's basically something which costs a huge amount
of money especially when you want to connect two Locations. When you need HA
and don't get such a network you would need to create a Overlay Network over
VPN, etc by yourself which could be quite hard to manage (even for a low
amount of servers) In germany we could buy Virtual servers as low as 5-10 Euro
/ month however you can't buy 3 in different locations and they are connected
with an private internal network for free (there aren't even many hosters that
will do that, i don't think there are any outside of the saas platforms)
however you could rent non virtual servers and buy additional stuff on these
Hosters which adds a huge costs per month. So running on AWS / Google Cloud /
Azure / etc could be really cheap. It just depends on the Things you need.

Edit: Also AWS gives you a lot of credits for just doing surveys for their new
stuff. I have so many credits so that I run my private gitlab instance on AWS
and it costs me nothing. I never got a credit of my previous Hoster which I
used over 10 years. On AWS I just got a 200 USD Credit at the start since I
missed my Free year (also only cloud providers giving you credits, the most
other Hosters won't do that and they bareley give you something new on AWS.
You could now run a Website for basically nothing just with AWS Lambda which
costs nearly nothing.)

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enobrev
This may just be a semantic issue, but the term "public" seems entirely
misused in this article.

~~~
wmf
For better or worse, "public cloud, in which users share the resources of a
service provider" is now an accepted term of art in the industry. It doesn't
really matter whether it agrees with people's commonsense understanding of the
word "public".

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orbitur
This is 3rd article this week I've been blocked from reading. How are people
continually reading and upvoting these links? Is everyone a subscriber?

Screenshot: [http://i.imgur.com/FGY1lSv.png](http://i.imgur.com/FGY1lSv.png)

~~~
incepted
I'm a bit mystified.

The link goes to an empty article but if you google the exact title, you will
be taken to the full article which... has the exact same URL.

I don't know what kind of wizardry this is.

~~~
valleyer
Not wizardry. Checking referer.

<[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer>](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer>)

~~~
hasenj
Indistinguishible form magic

