Netflix's Cloud Edge Architecture

From an article titled, Netflix's Cloud Edge Architecture: Netflix streaming turned 14 years old in January 2021. Rewinding back to 2007, streaming was called “Watch Now” and it only worked on Windows PCs (see this Hacking Netflix article about the initial launch). The architecture powering the streaming experience was very simple: hardware load balancer, a monolithic webapp, a few web services, and a relational database all running in one data center. That worked well for the thousands of members using streaming at that time. Fast forward to 2021 and Netflix has 200M+ global member households, 1000+ supported devices, and 1000s of original titles. Powering this requires a very different architecture.