• Pika@sh.itjust.works
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    4 days ago

    I’m struggling to understand how a company as big as Netflix is paying for a cloud service. Like for the cost that they’re charging customers monthly on top of how big they are, I really figured they would be running their own infrastructure at this point it seems like a needless money Leach to not be. Like sure you have to pay for the infrastructure and maintaining the infrastructure, but there is no way that on the scale that Netflix is and with how data transfer heavy it is, that it’s more cost-effective to be running a cloud stack.

    • dragontamer@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Netflix has a substantial number of caching boxes owned by Netflix on the edge.

      This means that a neighborhood has a cache server with 20TB of video serving everyone in the neighborhood (and maybe also the next 3 or 4 neighborhoods). So if everyone watches the same episode they only pay for one cloud download / bandwidth cost.

      Netflix outsources cloud for their core infra but then runs very very heavy edges around the world. It’s backwards but if you think about Netflix and the watching pattern of neighborhoods (ex: neighbor likely tells friends a new show is good, then everyone watches it) it’s to the benefit of Netflix to run their infra like this.

      I wouldn’t be surprised if these caching servers help each other out like BitTorrent either to avoid central cloud bandwidth costs.