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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Netflix runs on the cloud and does 30% of all internet traffic.

That being said, 99% of that traffic is served from servers in colos now, but 10 years ago it was all served from CDN providers like Akamai, which is just a specialized cloud.

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This is kind of a big caveat (“Netflix is in the cloud but almost none of the work is done there”), and something I have to mention to non tech decision makers when they say “but Netflix!”. I even have a slide for presentations just for this (“You Are Not Netflix”).

99% of the work is done on the cloud. What comes off of those colo servers is literally just bits streaming from disk to network. There is no transformation or anything. No authentication, no user accounts, no database. Nothing.

Just static files served efficiently.

For models where static files need to be served efficiently, using cloud compute and aggressive CDNs works great. For any model where you've got volatile data that can't be cached (Gaming, VOIP, etc) you're tough out of luck.

For sure. There are absolutely use cases where the cloud doesn't make sense.

Most businesses out there aren't those kinds of businesses.

> What comes off of those colo servers is literally just bits streaming from disk to network

So... the core of their business?

Not at all. It was so “not core” that it was outsourced.

The core of their business is recommendations, encoding, and authentication. All of those are done 100% on the cloud.

Sure but probably 99% of the

> 30% of all internet traffic.

is outside of the cloud.

Anyone know the bill Netflix has for running on the cloud ?

That'a very significant, nevertherless. For workloads that arw not diverae in terms of software, but simply burn CPU, Ram and network, cloud is not cost effective

I'm having trouble understanding what point is being made. Netflix entire business is shipping bulk data, I imagine the cost of transcoding and media management to be a rounding error in that grand scheme.

Netflix appears to support what I was saying rather than negate it

The netflix CDN specifically exists because of cloud bandwidth charges.

That’s not true. It exists because Akamai and friends couldn’t serve the data fast enough.

Do you really think Netflix get the standard billing prices ? I very much doubt so.

I don't think most of the replies realize that you might be pretty familiar with Netflix's infrastructure.

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