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Andrew Park, Manager – Technology FP&A

10.7.15

Efficient InnovationHigh Velocity Cost Management at Netflix

What to Expect from the Session

• Managing efficiency vs. innovation & availability

• How and why cloud mgmt. has changed at Netflix

• Best practices & future goals

The Efficiency Challenge

Netflix: world’s largest

subscription Internet TV

business

Business Stats:

>60m members

2,000+ employees

80+ countries

>100m hours watched per day

Strategy: innovation & availability

prioritized above efficiency

Engineering Stats:

1,400 Tech & Dev. engineers

40+ independent teams

500+ microservices

90,000+ instances (~15% autoscaling)

Cloud Cost Timeline

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~Not 20x Growth

Dollars

(normalized)

Cost per stream

(normalized)

The Foundations Present Day The Dream

Our foundations

• Forming the Cloud Capacity Team

• Matching processes with strategy

• Developing transparency tools

The Who: Cloud Capacity Planners

“Serving customers, not keeping gates”

Main Responsibilities

Strategy & Operations

• Scalable cloud growth

• Ad-hoc internal consulting

• Capacity liaisons with AWS

Capacity Planning

• Purchasing capacity

• Planning with major teams

• Retroactive RI purchasing

Retroactive Reservation Purchasing

• Look back purchases of on-demand

• Bi-weekly process includes rebalancing unused RIs

• Purchasing considerations:

Implementing Retroactive Purchasing

• Assumptions & processes required:

• Understanding about infrastructure & usage by account

• Irregular growth to be communicated

• Robust usage dashboards & cost tools

• Benefits:

• Lowered deployment friction accelerating innovation

• Reduced operational overhead management

• Potential reduction of “capacity sandbagging”

On-demand in Aug’15

C*

scale-up

Edge service

migration

Global

memcache

replication

General Cloud Capacity Strategies

• Strat: Service oriented architecture @ massive scale

• Process: centralized cloud capacity planning function

• Strat: Unconstrained deployment capabilities

• Process: develop contextual efficiency information via tooling

• Strat: Improve overall availability

• Process: dedicated failover capacity, critical services on

general instance families

Transparency Through Tooling

• Invest in robust tooling for capacity team

• Reveal AWS usage & cost back to service teams

• Select a business metric to set growth context

Historic Cloud Cost Email

KPI dashboard

Detailed Cost Dashboards - Demo

VP Level

Director / 1st Level

Engineering Manager

Application Level

Detailed Cost Dashboards - Demo

VP Level

Director / 1st Level

Engineering Manager

Application Level

Detailed Cost Dashboards - Demo

VP Level

Director / 1st Level

Engineering Manager

Application Level

Netflix Today

• Decentralizing cloud cost responsibilities

• Active ROI analysis with largest service teams

• Exposing efficiency metrics beyond instance usage

Real Time Actionable Data

“ROI” Based Mindset

• Cause: today’s scale requires thoughtful deployment

strategy & service architecture

• Cloud capacity team engaged on a per-project basis

Pro-tip: Internal Unused RI Borrowing

Prod Heavy

RI Usage

Encoding

Heavy RI

Borrowed

Efficiency Score Cards

The Future of Cloud Cost Management

• Bin-packing at the service level through containers

• Dynamic traffic shifting between regions

• Automated ROI calculations at testing & deployment

Session Recap

• EC2: Everyone Contributes Cost

• S3: Smart Strategy Saves

• Data Transfer: Develop Transparency

• RDS: Remove Datacenter Sentiment

• Managing efficiency vs. innovation & availability

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Thank you!

Contact: andrewp@netflix.com

Office Hours: 3:45-5:30pm @ Netflix Booth 326

Remember to complete

your evaluations!

Related Sessions

• SPOT302 – Availability: The New Kind of Innovator’s Dilemma

• DVO203 – A Day in the Life of a Netflix Engineer using 37% of the

Internet

• ISM301 – Engineering Netflix Global Operations in the Cloud