Amazon and Netflix might be rivals when it comes to streaming, but they’re business buddies too.
Netflix has finally closed its last data centre, meaning the company relies entirely on Amazon for streaming.
The media giant has now moved its entire business to Amazon Web Services – Amazon’s cloud arm.
The final shutdown took place in early January, and was revealed yesterday in a blog post by Netflix’s Yury Izrailevsky, VP of Cloud.
“After seven years of diligent effort, we have finally completed our cloud migration and shut down the last remaining data centre bits used by our streaming service,” says Izrailevsky.
All Netflix streams now come via Amazon Web Services
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It’s worth noting that Netflix had already moved the majority of its systems to Amazon Web Services prior to 2015, but today marks the completion of that transition.
It’s a journey that originally began in August 2008, sparked by a crisis at Netflix HQ:
“We experienced a major database corruption and for three days could not ship DVDs to our members,” explains Izraeilevsky. “That is when we realised that we had to move away from vertically scaled single points of failure…towards highly reliable…systems in the cloud.”
He adds: “We chose Amazon Web Services as our cloud provided because it provided us with the greatest scale and the broadest set of services and features.”
At the end of 2015, Netflix had an impressive 75 million subscribers globally, up on 24 million in the fourth quarter of 2011. By comparison, Amazon Video had 65.2 million viewers at the tail end of last year.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
