Solved Did Netflix move to Ubuntu? If yes, why?

So, judging from the part mentioned on that page, around 4:40 into the video, I suspect he's talking about the fact that (as far as I know, haven't googled it, so I could be wrong) that most of the content is stored on Amazon VMs, which are, I think, usually Ubuntu. So, it's quite possible that the "everything" Mr. Shuttleworth mentions isn't really everything.

Only a guess though, when 2 minutes of google didn't give me the answer, I stopped looking.
 
Mage said:
Question on Quora

I haven’t found anything helpful. Is this true? If yes, why would one do that?
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I doubted you will find the answer to your question on this forum or for that matter on any public place. That is a such high level business decision that anybody who has access to such information would be a fool to risk seven figure salary to BS about it with people like you and I.
 
I'm not going to bother listening through all that. The only thing that it possibly talks of is some of the backend stuff may be running Ubuntu. As far as content delivery is concerned, Netflix does that through FreeBSD and contributes to FreeBSD to help enhance that and for that specific purpose. So, Netflix most certainly did NOT move to Ubuntu from FreeBSD.
 
If you do look at the link, it does specify that it happens at 4:40. (I was also originally put off by the length of the video. Too lazy to go back and get the exact quote, but it wasn't a mention of moving from FreeBSD to Ubuntu, it just said Netflix has everything on Ubuntu or something similar.
 
gpatrick said:
This Netflix page shows the CDN using FreeBSD 10 now, whereas in 2013 it was 9.x.
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You don't actually expect us to take the word of the primary source over that of one guy making one off-hand remark for one second during one talk at one conference without citing any sources in a random video on the Internet, do you? Madness... :rolleyes:
 
Oko said:
I doubted you will find the answer to your question on this forum or for that matter on any public place. That is a such high level business decision that anybody...
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I don’t know what you mean. It’s common that big companies explain such decisions in public. For example, Uber has a detailed post why they moved from PostreSQL to MySQL. Quora also explained how they mix Cassandra with PostgreSQL. Twitter explained why the partially moved from Ruby on Rails to Scala.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
I'm not going to bother listening through all that. As far as content delivery is concerned, Netflix does that through FreeBSD and contributes to FreeBSD to help enhance that and for that specific purpose. So, Netflix most certainly did NOT move to Ubuntu from FreeBSD.
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I also couldn’t find a reason to watch it through, I was only wondering if it’s true. The FreeBSD 11 release notes state which features were supported by Netflix. Why would a company actively support an OS if they turned to another a year ago.

However, googling for "Netflix FreeBSD" will show the linked article as the first result. At least for me. It’s misleading, isn’t it?
 
Sure, it's misleading, but the only reason it might matter would be if you were trying to convince your company or a client to use FreeBSD over Linux, and if you point it out by googling FreeBSD netflix, you'll see all sorts of things indicating that Netflix is using FreeBSD.
(Although, as I mentioned before, much of the content storage is still on Linux).
 
Mage said:
However, googling for "Netflix FreeBSD" will show the linked article as the first result.
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Google deliberately tailors its list of results based on your previous searches in order to present you with what it (a computer program) thinks you want to see. It's a terrible research tool. Google shows that Quora page as the second result for me---which is still almost as high as you can get, sure, but then the #1 slot is held by the official Netflix page stating that they use FreeBSD for their CDN. DuckDuckGo, my search engine of choice, puts that Quora page over twenty slots down.

Note that in both cases it's the Quora page that gets on the list----not an official announcement or the Shuttleworth video itself.
 
Yeah, when I did Netflix FreeBSD the second hit was a Quora post, Why did Netflix choose FreeBSD over LInux. :)

So, back to the original question, as far as we can tell with a bit of lazy googling, Netflix hasn't switched from FreeBSD to Ubuntu.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Interesting. I don't get that link at all with "Netflix FreeBSD".
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Me either, no first page hits (didn't bother looking further) when I tried google, bing, ddg and ixquick. Only ixquick gave me a quora link as a second result and that was another question asking why freebsd was chosen over linux.
 
To be clear, I got the same hit on Quora that scottro did but I did not get a hit at all on the Ubuntu thing.

All of this is much ado about nothing. Netflix is still using FreeBSD the same as they always have and nothing has changed with that at all.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
To be clear, I got the same hit on Quora that scottro did but I did not get a hit at all on the Ubuntu thing.

All of this is much ado about nothing. Netflix is still using FreeBSD the same as they always have and nothing has changed with that at all.
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Not only for you: English isn’t my native language, however, I tried my best by putting two question marks in the title of this thread. I’m wondering what kind of grammar mistake I might have made that turned the title into a statement.

There are many people out there who try to convince their managers to use non-garbage software. (I’m lucky enough to be not one of them.)

Managers (and clueless IT directors) often make decisions based on "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". It does matter whether one can say: "Yeah, you are right, everyone is using Linux, because it’s the best, except Netflix who generates the 50% of the Internet traffic, and Whatsapp, one of the lucky startups bought up by Facebook, and the PS4."

I have no doubt that Netflix is the strongest name on this list, at least for the clueless. Why is it important? The more company chooses our favourite server OS the more resources FreeBSD gets.

I hope we haven’t run out of free space on the server hosting this forum while we clarified FreeBSD + Netflix.
 
ANOKNUSA said:
Google deliberately tailors its list of results based on your previous searches in order to present you with what it (a computer program) thinks you want to see. It's a terrible research tool. Google shows that Quora page as the second result for me---which is still almost as high as you can get, sure, but then the #1 slot is held by the official Netflix page stating that they use FreeBSD for their CDN. DuckDuckGo, my search engine of choice, puts that Quora page over twenty slots down.

Note that in both cases it's the Quora page that gets on the list----not an official announcement or the Shuttleworth video itself.
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I know how Google works, they are my company’s most important partner in business. There are various browsers installed on my computers with clean cookie settings. They use various IP addresses that belong to various countries to run market research. The linked Quora page is usually either the first or the second hit. It’s not a surprise. Quora is the only website whose newsletter I have ever deliberately subscribed to. I would say, the engines that list it lower are the worse ones. But it’s a question of taste.

Anyway, I haven’t heard about DuckDuckGo until today. I know people who use non-tracking search engines. Yet "normal" people use Google, Bing, and for a mysterious reason, they might use Yahoo. That’s it.

Most of the links I found about the Netflix and FreeBSD relationship are dated before 2015. The video is from 2015. It’s confusing.

Unless someone answers the question there.
 
Mage I don't know what you are getting at but I presume it's a communication problem. Your question is, "Did Netflix move to Ubuntu?", and the answer is "No", so there is nothing else to talk about, which is my point.
 
Mage said:
I would say, the engines that list it lower are the worse ones. But it’s a question of taste.
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Here's how things look from my perspective: recently, a person performed a Google search and found a Quora page at the top of the list of search results. There, they saw a few seconds of video in which one person made an unsubstantiated remark. Rather than researching to verify the veracity and verity of that remark, they hopped into an online forum and asked other people to do the researching and thinking for them. One has to ask if, had that online forum not been there, the person in question may have simply taken that unsubstantiated remark in that video at face value simply because it was at the top of the list, and in that person's eyes, being on top of a list inherently grants more veracity to that search result. If the "matter of taste" you're referring to is that Google just presents you with what you prefer to see---rather than a variety of information to help you become better-informed----I consider that a significant issue. But then, I don't know you well enough to judge whether that's what you're looking for. That's just how I see things.

Mage said:
I know people who use non-tracking search engines.
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"Non-tracking" is just one feature. Here's the other:

https://is.gd/4NQSZx
https://is.gd/L0kNuf
https://is.gd/EHZa1u
https://is.gd/y8NN76
 
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