DevOps Case study : NETFLIX
DevOps has become a Culture in today’s world which is changing the way a Development and Operations team operate, whereas in DevOps culture everyone has access to DevOps tools and responsible for the all aspects of the product and has to understand its entire deployment cycle as they iterate on it. Adaptation of DevOps usually coincides with transition to agile development and moving product towards microservice architecture, which aid in generating more business for the organisations because most software flaws may be fixed right away. DevOps practices in a company are successful due to the critical success factors of DevOps. These success factors of an organisation can help companies in changing their current culture and help in adapting to future changes in DevOps practices.
Netflix is a streaming platform with a focus on entertainment. It has a subscription-based business model which offers on-demand videos anytime through the internet.
Netflix experienced a major database corruption in 2008 which led to a temporary service discontinuation. It prompted Netflix to move its infrastructure to the cloud. Netflix chose AWS as its cloud partner and by letting Amazon handle the infrastructure, Netflix was able to concentrate on its product. That is one of the main factors contributing to their increased rate of the innovation. Consequently, Netflix adopted containerization which enables it to absorb its benefits as well.
In geographically distributed systems outages are quite common. Netflix developed a collection of tools called “Simian Army” to detect anomalies and to artificially produce all kinds of inevitable failures, in order to evaluate the system’s resilience and incorporate automatic recovery methods to make the system fault-tolerant.
Having such a reliable, fault-tolerant system, Netflix has been able to provide its engineers complete access to its production environment and let them handle issues in the manner they believe is most effective. By taking this approach, Netflix embraced the “Operate what you build” concept by drawing on DevOps principles.
Furthermore, as Netflix is hiring talented individuals with independent decision-making skills, Netflix has been able to achieve near-perfect uptime. Additionally, Netflix offers training in many formats and user-friendly tools which assist developers in building up the required skills.
Despite being the finest DevOps company, Netflix’s work environment is unique. Although Netflix does not prioritise uptime at cost of sacrificing innovation, zero downtime is more crucial in sectors such as healthcare and banking. Therefore, Netflix’s practices might not be appropriate in most organizations even though they are willing to take a little more risk.
Netflix is a one of the best example for identifying advantages of using DevOps and how it can be of success for organisations which use it. With an emphasis on automating as much of the release process as possible and sharing code and responsibility among all teams working on a given product, DevOps culture often employs a continuous integration and deployment approach with automation in developing, testing and deploying applications with integrated operations as well as team monitoring operations. It can provide Acceleration in Innovation as DevOps teams can increase functionality by adding new microservices without unduly harming existing application components. Software bugs can be instantly corrected, As the frequency of code release increases the chances of failures are less. This helps in changing the applications as per the needs of the customer. One of the advantages of deploying applications through DevOps is that improves collaboration thus making the work more efficient.
Nowadays, cloud deployments and virtual infrastructure has become more popular. DevOps also offers Scalable infrastructure in the cloud. However, using container clusters to construct microservices is a method that is becoming more and more popular. Microservices can be packaged, deployed, and isolated using containers, while orchestration scales out a group of containers into an application.
References:
Dobra, A. (2021) How is netflix so good at devops? |, Bunnyshell. Bunnyshell. Available at: https://www.bunnyshell.com/blog/how-netflix-does-devops/ (Accessed: January 15, 2023).
Dhaduk, H. (2022) How netflix became a master of devops? an exclusive case study, Simform. Available at: https://www.simform.com/blog/netflix-devops-case-study/ (Accessed: January 15, 2023).
