Netflix is the world's leading internet television network. In this presentation, I talk about the aspects of Netflix culture that have contributed to its success. The freedom and responsibility culture, with highly aligned, loosely coupled teams of amazing, enthusiastic, helpful, high performance people with excellent judgement has helped build Netflix to adapt and change quickly, and iterate to make the best service possible. By eliminating rules and processes, and ensuring that employees have the contexts of the business in all aspects, Netflix has enabled employees to use their judgement to get things done rather than relying on control or process. This has resulted in Netflix becoming a leader in not only internet streaming, but also cloud computing, media, and culture. Because of the Netflix culture, we have been able to attract and retain great employees. I give a few examples from my team, Edge Engineering of how the culture enables us to build the high scale, resilient and dynamic services that are the front door to the Netflix streaming application, and how the freedom we have has enabled us to open source core technologies that are needed for large scale, service-oriented architectures in a cloud environment. This slideshow also gives a high level overview of how the streaming service works, and how Netflix's Open Connect Appliance can help ISPs.

1. Netflix’s Success through
Technology and Culture
Mikey Cohen
Netflix
September 4, 2014

3. Over 50 million subscribers
in over 40 countries

4. Netflix accounts for over 34% of peak internet traffic
in North America

5. 1,000,000,000 hours is
about
100,000 years
per month...

6. Netflix supports over 1000 device types

7. How it all Began
...a short history

8. 1999 - DVD by Mail

9. Netflix vs Blockbuster

10. “Epic” Battle ends..

11. 2007- Netflix Streaming Begins

12. Huge Growth in Streaming

13. Tomorrow:
3 Years in Latin America!

14. Very Soon! Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland,
Belgium, Luxembourg

15. Why has Netflix Been Successful?

16. Netflix is a different kind of Company

17. Imagine..

19. Freedom and Responsibility

20. Highly Aligned - Loosely Coupled

21. Context not Control

22. Rules

23. Hiring

24. Management Leadership

25. Pay

26. Focus

27. ..In short
Netflix culture enables talented people to build
great products by minimizing process and
enabling us to do what we love...

28. About my Team (Edge Engineering)
● Build and operate the front door and control
systems for Netflix streaming
● Billions of requests per day
● Constant code changes
● ~ 20 people
○ Platform 5
○ Delivery 5
○ Services 6
○ Management 4

29. Netflix Culture and Edge Engineering
● Build highly scalable, resilient, dynamic
systems
● Act fast, react fast
● Freedom to radically experiment
● Open Source what we developed

30. OSS Thought Leadership from my small team
● Zuul - Netflix’s Cloud Edge Router
● Hystrix - Service Resilience
● RxJava - Reactive Extensions
● Turbine - Data stream aggregation
● Ribbon2 - SOA client
● Prana - Cloud platform support for multiple
programming languages.
● Scryer - Predictive cloud Autoscaling (** not yet)
● Nicobar - Dynamic code/scripting library (** not yet)

31. Success of the Culture
● Streaming Success
● Media Success
● Cloud Computing Leader
● Cultural Leader
● Attract and retain great employees

32. How Netflix Streaming Works

33. The Parts..
Netflix
Services
in Amazon Cloud
(AWS)
CDN Your CE Device

34. Our Cloud Infrastructure

35. Zuul
Edge Services (API and Playback)
Website
Netflix Services
Cassandra
Memcache

36. Device Under the Hood
Cloud
User Interface
Netflix Streaming Platform
CDN Your CE Device

37. User Interface loaded, data retrieved from
Cloud
Netflix Edge Service
CDN
Edge
Services
User Interface
Netflix Streaming Platform
Your CE Device

38. Cloud
User Interface Loaded
CDN
User Interface
Netflix Streaming Platform
CE integration
Edge
Services
Your CE Device

39. Authorization / Obtain License
Cloud
User Interface
Netflix Streaming Platform
Your CE Device
CDN
Edge
Services
Your CE Device

40. Cloud
Content and CDN located
User Interface
Netflix Streaming Platform
Your CE Device
CDN
CE integration
Edge
Services
PlayData
Your CE Device

41. Cloud
Streaming Starts
User Interface
Netflix Streaming Platform
Your CE Device
CDN
CE integration
Edge
Services
Your CE Device

42. Content Delivery
User Interface
Netflix Streaming Platform
DRM
Cloud
encoding
Your CE Device
CDN
CE integration

43. How Netflix can help ISP’s

44. ...as Netflix gains popularity...

45. Inbound network traffic increases

46. Netflix Open Connect to the Rescue!
Netflix
OCA

47. Netflix Open Connect
● Reduces ISP cost by serving Netflix traffic from
the local ISP datacenter, rather than upstream
network interconnects
● Netflix bears the capital and maintenance costs,
not ISP
● ISP provides space, power and a network port
● Free of charge to ISP

48. How Open Connect has helped ISPs
● 10X ISP traffic growth in < 12 months after
Open Connect
● About 90% of Netflix traffic offset by Open
Connect in Latin America (~80% in N. Am)
● International transit cost savings
● Ultra HD/4k streams, 3D streams, and high
Netflix Speed Index attracts and retains ISP
customers

49. The Future of Netflix and Television

50. Future of Netflix and Television
● Internet TV
○ By 2016 50% of television will be delivered by
internet
● Smart TV revolution
○ 100 million Smart TV’s will be sold this year
○ By 2025 everyone will have a smart television
● Smart Netflix - Algorithms
○ Predict the 1 - 3 shows you want to watch now.

51. Internet TV & Creative Freedom

52. How Netflix will get us to the future

53. Technology

54. Execution

55. Culture

56. For more information...
● Netflix Culture
● Netflix Open
Source
● Tech Blog
● Jobs