ᐈ Netflix tech stack for streaming and cloud solutions

During its existence, Netflix has grown from a local DVD rental service into a world-famous streaming company that reaches millions of users around the world. There are many factors behind this impressive success, among which technological leadership plays an important role.

The creation of such a large-scale product required the use of the most modern software development technologies and approaches, many of which later became widespread in the IT industry. Netflix, along with Google, Facebook, and Amazon, has become one of the top-level technological companies.

Let's take a closer look at what exactly is included in the Netflix tech stack.

This article mainly describes individual technologies and tools used by the company. A more detailed description of the architecture and architectural solutions used for video streaming can be found in the article Diving into Netflix cloud architecture.

Netflix Technology Stack

Fast and seamless streaming requires all parts of the product (both the client and the backend) to be developed as thoughtfully and efficiently as possible. For each part, it is necessary to use the most appropriate technologies and tools. Let's take a closer look at what solutions are used by the client part and backend.

Client

Acquaintance with the product begins with the client part. It is its perfection, well-developed design, and reliable technological solutions that can provide a positive user experience and a high level of satisfaction with the product. Otherwise, disappointment can lead to a significant drop in popularity and failure in the market.

The company provides streaming for various platforms, with unique client parts. Let's consider in turn what technologies are used in each case.

Smart TV. The Netflix TV Application is based on JavaScript and Gibbon, as well as native Software Development Kits (SDKs) for various TV models. An adapted version of React is also used - React-Gibbon.
JavaScript is a popular programming language for web development. Most often, it is used to create web page elements and scripts, i.e. the client part.
Gibbon is a JavaScript application that serves as a rendering layer for dynamic content updates. This is the company's software solution.
React-Gibbon is a version of the React library adapted to use with Gibbon. Like the original React, it is designed to simplify the development of the User Interface (UI). This is also its software solution.
Web interface. HTML5, React, and Redux are used to develop web interfaces.
HTML5 is the last release of the HTML web page markup language. It differs from previous versions in its simplified embedding of multimedia content.
React is a JavaScript language library. It allows you to simplify the development of the user interface (UI).
Redux is also a JavaScript language library. It is designed to manage the state of JavaScript applications. Often used in conjunction with React.

Netflix Backend

The server part (backend) is based on the Java and Python programming languages. The Java Spring Boot framework is also used. Apache Kafka and Apache Flint are used to process events and application data streams.

Java is a common compiled programming language. It is platform-independent, so the application can run on various devices and operating systems. Java is widely used to develop cloud applications (microservices), and embedded software, and to process large amounts of data.
Python is an interpreted object-oriented programming language. It is widely used for web development, scripting, and data processing.
Java Spring Boot is a Java language framework. It allows you to simplify the development of Java applications and microservices using a modular approach.
Apache Kafka is a widely used distributed platform dedicated to working with events in an application. Kafka receives and stores event messages from various processes (“producers”). These messages are provided on demand to other processes in the application (“consumers”).
Apache Flint is a high-throughput framework that processes data streams in an application.

Data Storage Approaches

Adaptive selection of suitable tools ensures efficient and resilient data storage even in the case of technical problems with the cloud infrastructure or local software.

Amazon Simple Storage Service

Netflix stores and provides users with petabytes of diverse video content. Movies and TV series are streamed to millions of users around the world. It is critical to ensure fast and reliable access to data. Therefore, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is used to store media. Amazon S3 provides the ability to quickly and significantly scale the stored data volume without the need to add new equipment or deploy its cloud infrastructure on the part of the streaming company. Another advantage is high fault tolerance. Even in the event of technical problems with Amazon's infrastructure, users can access the content they are interested in.

NoSQL Usage

During the transition to cloud deployment of services, the company faced the inability to provide the required level of scaling solely using traditional relational data models. The consequence was the transition to the NoSQL paradigm. Currently, the product ecosystem uses three main NoSQL tools: SimpleDB, Hadoop/HBase, and Cassandra.

Amazon SimpleDB is a cloud service that provides distributed database functions, namely data indexing and querying. It has significant capabilities for building queries, provides automatic replication, and a high level of reliability.

Apache HBase provides the capabilities of a distributed NoSQL database able to work with Hadoop-based systems. HBase works based on distributed file systems, implementing a fast and fault-tolerant way to store large volumes of sparse data.

Apache Cassandra is another distributed database management system. Cassandra stores data in the form of a hash, ensuring the creation of high-performance and reliable data warehouses.

MySQL Integration in AWS

In addition to NoSQL, more traditional approaches are also used. Netflix uses database solutions based on MySQL in its billing infrastructure. This provides the ability to scale the product while simultaneously fulfilling the requirements of ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability) transactions when processing payments. MySQL solutions are adapted for use in the AWS cloud infrastructure, allowing you to fully utilize its capabilities with reliable and productive access to data in the operation of the billing system.

CI/CD Tools Usage

To ensure flexible and automated software deployment and continuous implementation of updates, the concept of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is used. For its practical implementation, tools like Jenkins and Spinnaker are used.

Jenkins is a widely used Continuous Integration (CI) automating and planning tool. With its help, you can automate builds and running tests by writing appropriate scripts. Jenkins has a developed ecosystem of plugins that allow flexible expansion of the tool's functionality. At the same time, using Jenkins may require manual operations and have limitations when working with distributed cloud systems.

Spinnaker is more of a Continuous Deployment Tool. It is not intended for builds. Spinnaker provides the ability to manage continuous deployment pipelines with built-in support for various deployment strategies, creating load balancers, resizing clusters, and executing rollbacks. It also provides more convenient pipeline management, especially in the context of using multi-cloud infrastructure.

AWS role in Netflix infrustructure

The key role in the successful development and growth of the streaming service was played by the capabilities provided by the cloud infrastructure of Amazon Web Services (AWS). The complete transition to work in the cloud allowed flexible scaling based on the current load and the number of users, without significant capital investments in its own equipment and data centers.

Using AWS ensured reliable storage of media content with the ability to quickly and flexibly access worldwide. Thanks to distributed storage, it became possible to ensure high resistance to failures and service availability. Thus, the implementation of seamless streaming is achieved.

Also, the integration of the cloud infrastructure made it possible to ensure fast processing of requests with minimal delays. This ensures a positive User Experience when performing various actions in the service, such as authorization, managing video broadcasts, etc.

Netflix AWS usage made it possible to adapt the company's billing system to a significant increase in load. Using cloud storage and data processing, it guarantees scalable and secure billing and payment processing, meeting the most stringent requirements for modern payment systems. AWS also provides some ready-made software solutions to increase the reliability and efficiency of using its infrastructure, such as Ribbon, Eureka, and Hystrix. They provide increased resilience to failures, their isolation, and also an improved level of security when deploying a service in the cloud. This allows you to scale the product without a significant concomitant increase in the risk of software failures or violations of the security conditions of the system and user data.

Conclusions

The foundation of Netflix's rapid development and market success is based on thoughtful and effective technical solutions and the choice of technologies that are optimal for solving existing problems and challenges. The main features of the company's technology stack are:

Large-scale use of cloud services for the deployment of all the main product functionalities, full integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Transition to the NoSQL paradigm in database development, where it is possible and necessary
Modern and powerful Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) tools are used to achieve reliable and efficient deployment and management of software product updates
Use of proven and popular programming languages and frameworks in both client part and backend development, as well as their adaptation to various platforms.

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