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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

What happens if you need to encode a lot of videos during peak streaming?

The beauty of the cloud is that when that happens, they can burst up and use on-demand instances to increase the overall pool. With bare metal you either have to keep a bunch of spares or not be able to handle that situation.

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They would turn down the amount of encoding they do during peak streaming. They use their existing servers instead of paying for more servers to encode their Netflix Originals, but encoding isn't time sensitive so can just run on a "spot instance" when their reserved instances are under-utilised.

They'll need 4K, 1080p, 720p etc encoded versions ready for the release of the series, but they might have copies of some of the episodes ready for encoding a few months before the release, so can slowly encode them on their spare resources.

I worked there so I'm well aware of how it works. My point was sometimes they need to do a massive encode during peak, and having the cloud allows them to do that when necessary.

I agree 100%. The cloud is basically the only way to do massive parallel processing in a very short time window without the up front costs. But if this event is uncommon, you can do your massive encode on the cloud, and shut off the cloud resources after peak and go back to bare metal.

I think bare metal is simpler, and that simpler often means better, but there are limits to bare metal. Those limits are where the cloud can come in. You can (and many people do) use both.

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