Netflix after a seven year journey of transitioning from traditional data centers to the cloud has finally put to rest their last server. Yuri Izrailevsky, Netflix’s vice president of cloud and platform engineering states. “Arguably, the easiest way to move to the cloud is to forklift all the systems, unchanged, out of the data center and drop them in AWS. But in doing so, you end up moving all the problems and limitations of the datacenter along with it,” Izrailevsky explained. The closure of their finally data center marked a milestone for Netflix, by not only being a fully cloud dependent streaming service, but also being available globally as one of the largest media streaming applications in the world. Izrailevsky goes on to explain why they moved to cloud based systems, “Izrailevsky added that cost played second fiddle to elasticity as its main reason for moving to the cloud. Using multiple AWS regions also allows it to shift capacity around the world and enables it to add “petabytes of storage within minutes”.
