Why Netflix Is One of the Most Important Cloud Computing Companies 111
Brandon Butler writes "Netflix, yes the video rental company Netflix, is changing the cloud game. During the past two years the company has pulled back the curtains through its Netflix OSS program to provide a behind-the-scenes look into how it runs one of the largest deployments of Amazon Web Services cloud-based resources. In doing so, the company is creating tools that can be used by both entire business-size scale cloud deployments and even smaller test environments. The Simian Army, for example randomly kills off VMs or entire availability zones in Amazon's cloud to test fault tolerance, Asgard is a cloud resource dashboard and Lipstick on (Apache) Pig, is a data visualization tool for the Hadoop program; there are dozens of others that help deploy, manage and monitor the tens of thousands of VM instances the company company can be running at any single time. Netflix is also creating a cadre of developers who are experts in managing cloud deployments, and already its former employees are popping up at other companies to bring their expertise on how to run a large-scale cloud resources. Meanwhile, Netflix does this all in AWS's cloud, which raises some questions of how good of a job it's actually doing when it can be massively impacted by cloud outages, such as the one on Christmas Eve last year that brought down Netflix's services but, interestingly, not Amazon's own video streaming system, which is a competitor to the company."
Re:DRM Hell (Score:5, Informative)
You know what? There's actually a bloody gigantic amount of excellent content on NetFlix. Admittedly their ultra-pathetic interface makes it damned near impossible to find, but it is there.
Now, there are reasons to dislike DRM, and in fact the stupid regional DRM licences are one of the reasons why people pay extra to access US NetFlix instead of their local one*, And surely there are still times each month when I'll grab something from Pirate Bay because NetFlix doesn't have it.
But, and this is the big fat critical but, at the end of the day NetFlix works, works well, and delivers a hell of a lot of good programming for very, very little money. And does so in way that the DRM is simply not noticeable.
It may be preferable for NetFlix to have no DRM, but as it stands now I can't think of any practical difference it would make to my experience as a user.
Until the anti-DRM crowd creates a fully Open Source media service, licences tens of thousands of TV shows and movies, and serves it up DRM free, NetFlix is the best that we've got.
*If you're stuck with NetFlix Canada, well accept that you've got one quarter of the choices, and half of those feature Paul Gross.
Re:DRM Hell (Score:5, Informative)
The Media Source API that Netflix is helping to push also provides a lot of really useful features for non-drm video in the web browser as well. Providing a simple way to download chunks of video and seamlessly insert them into a container through javascript will prove really useful for javascript web applications. Even some of the encrypted stuff will be great for things like sharing personal videos with only a few friends.
As a web developer interested in new ways to provide video, the Media Source stuff would immediately be really useful to me, and I'm sure many other people who won't even touch the DRM part. Don't let one company sour the whole proposal.
Re:Open Source (Score:5, Informative)
I can run Netflix on Windows XP in a VM on Linux. But I can't run Netflix on Windows XP in a VM on Windows XP. This tells me two things. One, the DRM actually kicked in there somehow. Two, it doesn't kick in reliably enough to be worth one tenth of one shit. If you can capture the video output from vmware, and you can, then you can capture netflix streams without anything exotic.
OTOH I haven't tried this experiment using a guest OS which supports vsync on Silverlight video, i.e. Vista or later
Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)