Videos of the Netflix talks at AWS Re:Invent

by Adrian Cockcroft

Most of the talks and panel sessions at AWS Re:Invent were recorded, but there are so many sessions that it's hard to find the Netflix ones. Here's a link to all of the videos posted by AWS that mention Netflix: http://www.youtube.com/user/AmazonWebServices/videos?query=netflix

They are presented below in what seems like a natural order that tells the Netflix story, starting with the migration and video encoding talks, then talking about availability, Cassandra based storage, "big data" and security architecture, ending up with operations and cost optimization. Unfortunately a talk on Chaos Monkey had technical issues with the recording and is not available.

Embracing the Cloud

Presented by Neil Hunt - Chief Product Officer, and Yury Israilevsky - VP Cloud and Platform Engineering.

Join the product and cloud computing leaders of Netflix to discuss why and how the company moved to Amazon Web Services. From early experiments for media transcoding, to building the operational skills to optimize costs and the creation of the Simian Army, this session guides business leaders through real world examples of evaluating and adopting cloud computing.

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/ent101-embracing-the-cloud-final

Netflix's Encoding Transformation

Presented by Kevin McEntee, VP Digital Supply Chain.

Netflix designed a massive scale cloud based media transcoding system from scratch for processing professionally produced studio content. We bucked the common industry trend of vertical scaling and, instead, designed a horizontally scaled elastic system using AWS to meet the unique scale and time constraints of our business. Come hear how we designed this system, how it continues to get less expensive for Netflix, and how AWS represents a transformative opportunity in the wider media owning industry.

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/med202-netflixtranscodingtransformation

Highly Available Architecture at Netflix

Presented by Adrian Cockcroft (@adrianco) Director of Architecture

This talk describes a set of architectural patterns that support highly available services that are also scalable, low cost, low latency and allow agile continuous deployment development practices. The building blocks for these patterns have been released at netflix.github.com as open source projects for others to use.

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/arc203-netflixha

Optimizing Your Cassandra Database on AWS

Presented by Ruslan Meshenberg - Director of Cloud Platform Engineering and Gregg Ulrich - Cassandra DevOps Manager

For a service like Netflix, data is crucial. In this session, Netflix details how they chose and leveraged Cassandra, a highly-available and scalable open source key/value store. In this presentation they discuss why they chose Cassandra, the tools and processes they developed to quickly and safely move data into AWS without sacrificing availability or performance, and best practices that help Cassandra work well in AWS.
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/dat202-cassandra

Data Science with Elastic Map Reduce

Presented by Kurt Brown - Director, Data Science Engineering Platform

In this talk, we dive into the Netflix Data Science & Engineering architecture. Not just the what, but also the why. Some key topics include the big data technologies we leverage (Cassandra, Hadoop, Pig + Python, and Hive), our use of Amazon S3 as our central data hub, our use of multiple persistent Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) clusters, how we leverage the elasticity of AWS, our data science as a service approach, how we make our hybrid AWS / data center setup work well, and more.
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/bdt303-netflix-data-science-with-emr

Security Panel

Featuring Jason Chan, Director of Cloud Security Architecture.

Learn from fellow customers, including Jason Chan of Netflix, Khawaja Shams of NASA, and Rahul Sharma of Averail, who have leveraged the AWS secure platform to build business critical applications and services. During this panel discussion, our panelists share their experiences utilizing the AWS platform to operate some of the world’s largest and most critical applications.

How Netflix Operates Clouds for Maximum Freedom and Agility

Presented by Jeremy Edberg (@jedberg), Reliability Architect

In this session, learn how Netflix has embraced DevOps and leveraged all that Amazon has to offer to allow our developers maximum freedom and agility.
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/rmg202-devops-atnetflixreinvent

Optimizing Costs with AWS

Presented by Coburn Watson - Manager, Cloud Performance Engineering

Find out how Netflix, one of the largest, most well-known and satisfied AWS customers, develop and run their applications efficiently on AWS. The manager of the Netflix Cloud Performance Engineering team outlines a common-sense approach to effectively managing AWS usage costs while giving the engineers unconstrained operational freedom.
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/cpwatson/aws-reinvent-optimizing-costs-with-aws

Intro to Chaos Monkey and the Simian Army

Presented by Ariel Tsetlin - Director of Cloud Solutions

Why were the monkeys created, what makes up the Simian Army, and how do we run and manage them in the production environment.
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/arc301netflixsimianarmy

Unfortunately the video recording had technical problems.

In Closing...

We had a great time and enjoyed the opportunity to have a large number of Netflix executives, managers and architects tell the "Netflix in the Cloud" story in much more detail than usual. Hopefully this summary makes it easier to watch all our talks and follow that story.