Here’s why every Netflix viewer needs Amazon

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}

“Netflix streaming technology has come a long way over the past few years,” he continues. “And it feels great to finally not be constrained by the limitations we’ve previously faced.”

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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Related: Netflix vs Amazon Video

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