One Pager Cheat Sheet

• Netflix's systems design is a testament to evolving architecture to handle massive growth, with the company focusing on ensuring scalability, availability, and performance to deliver a seamless streaming experience for millions of users worldwide, accommodating their individual preferences and network capabilities.
• Netflix's system design involves managing petabytes of data due to large media files and metadata, handling millions of simultaneous streaming sessions for over 200 million subscribers, processing about 35 billion daily customer activities to run recommendation algorithms, adapting to various network speeds to provide adaptable bitrates for quality streaming, maintaining 99.99% uptime for reliability and ensuring robust security for sensitive subscriber data and DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems.
• Netflix's massive streaming service involves meticulously designed and orchestrated core components such as Object Storage in S3 and custom filesystems for robust storage solutions, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) like Open Connect for content distribution, intelligent caching layers for reducing latency, Media Encoding and Formats for optimized viewing, MySQL, Cassandra, and DynamoDB databases for metadata, Media Pipeline and Processing systems for content readiness, a recommendation system with machine learning algorithms for personalized user experiences, and a playback interface with device-specific UIs and buffering and latency minimization techniques for an optimized viewing experience.
• Netflix's platform is built on a microservices architecture with decentralized services that interact via REST APIs and service discovery systems, allowing independent scaling and improving fault isolation. The server infrastructure heavily relies on Amazon Web Services (AWS), using EC2 instances for compute intensive tasks and S3 for storage, with on-premise servers globally deployed. Netflix features native apps for various client devices, constantly evolving to optimize the streaming experience and adapt to new devices. Addressing scaling challenges, Netflix employs strategies like compression, caching, and optimized media encoding, additionally leveraging horizontal scaling and serverless computing for future demands.
• Netflix's streaming process is a complex orchestration of components and servers, where a user's request initiates a series of actions such as interaction with the Recommendation System, selection of content via Playback Interface, verification by multiple microservices, metadata retrieval from Databases, connecting with Media Storage and CDN, applying adaptive bitrate streaming for smooth playback, maintaining a continuous feedback loop for system improvements, and finally ending with sending analytical data for user experience insights.
• Netflix, originally a DVD-by-mail service, has become a global leader in streaming due to its complex system of databases, algorithms, servers, and storage systems, demonstrating the power of technology in storytelling and user experience.