The massive cloud migration move that transferred billions of hours of film and TV content from Netflix's servers to Amazon's cloud service is finally complete.
In a statement posted on its official website, Netflix vice president for cloud and platform engineering Yury Izrailevsky wrote, "Our journey to the cloud at Netflix began in August of 2008, when we experienced a major database corruption and for three days could not ship DVDs to our members. We chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as our cloud provider because it provided us with the greatest scale and the broadest set of services and features."
While this move could greatly benefit Netflix users, the company also acknowledged that its reliance on Amazon can also open up some problems. One such incident occurred in September 2015 when a glitch on Amazon's cloud service temporarily caused outage on Netflix's streaming services.
Moreover, Netflix claims that such incidents will eventually become a rare occurrence following its move into cloud computing. The company claims that it is nearly completing its goal of running its service 99.99% of the time, this means that its streaming service will be down for less than 53 minutes per year, according to Fortune.
Prior to moving into the cloud platform, Netflix have had several outages in its own data centers. Netflix claims that these outages are inevitable but by integrating various techniques which will allow its service to survive failures in the cloud infrastructure, it can fix these loopholes without impacting its customer experience.
For some users, they might be questioning Amazon's decision to host Netflix contents especially when Amazon has its own online video streaming service to promote. While this might be a dilemma for some users, several market analysts speculate that Amazon must be making serious amounts of money from hosting Netflix contents and at the same time both companies are trying to convince people to shift into online streaming rather than traditional cable service.
Cooperation from rival companies is a well-accepted norm in the tech market. One prime example is between Samsung and Apple. While Samsung is key competitor to Apple's market, the former is also a major supply partner for the Cupertino-based tech company.