I don’t own any Netflix stock, but if I did I would ask “Do you really think hosting Netflix in streaming media competitor Amazon.com’s data centers is the best decision? What other cloud providers have you evaluated besides AWS?”
Being in the cloud makes sense, but couldn’t Netflix be in a facility like SoftLayer or Rackspace?
With Netflix’s outage in AWS, should these questions get asked?
Netflix Confirms Outage; Showtime Shows to Be Pulled
By Mark Hachman
Netflix reported problems with its Web site and streaming service on Tuesday night, which the company has yet to explain.
While the Web site was functional at 8 PM PT, newer interfaces such as those used by the Logitech Revue were unable to connect. Other users reported that Netflix streaming was still down via the Roku box and the PlayStation 3.
"We are aware that the website may not work for everyone at this time. We're working to get it fixed as quickly as we can," the NetflixHelps account tweeted about 4 PM Pacific time.
Netflix proudly discuss the 5 reasons why they went to AWS. I wonder what Netflix thinks about their #3 point.
3. The best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly.
We’ve sometimes referred to the Netflix software architecture in AWS as our Rambo Architecture. Each system has to be able to succeed, no matter what, even all on its own. We’re designing each distributed system to expect and tolerate failure from other systems on which it depends.
If our recommendations system is down, we degrade the quality of our responses to our customers, but we still respond. We’ll show popular titles instead of personalized picks. If our search system is intolerably slow, streaming should still work perfectly fine.
One of the first systems our engineers built in AWS is called the Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within our architecture. If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most – in the event of an unexpected outage.