The Netflix Stack

[drhowarddrfine]

A 360-degree view of what Netflix uses

The Netflix Open Connect CDN is provided for larger ISPs that have over 100,000 subscribers. A specially built low power high storage density appliance caches Netflix content within the ISPs’ data centers to reduce internet transit costs. This appliance runs the FreeBSD operating system, nginx and the Bird Internet routing daemon.

 

[usdmatt]

It's pretty common knowledge that they use FreeBSD, nginx & BIRD for Open Connect but there's some really interesting information about their entire architecture pulled together on that highscalability page. The linked video looks like it has some great insights as well; I'll have to see if I can find some time to sit down and watch the whole thing.

Really amazes me stuff like this. I've been in Internet tech for 15 years but some of the things these companies do still makes me wonder how the hell their developers managed to build it.

 

[protocelt]

At one of the FreeBSD conferences about a year or two ago a representative from Netflix explained in pretty good detail about how they tune FreeBSD for the kind of bandwidth they're pushing. There is a Youtube video of the presentation though I don't have a link off hand. It was quite interesting and unfortunately I'm not a network engineer so part of it was well over my head

 

[PacketMan]

Really amazes me stuff like this. I've been in Internet tech for 15 years but some of the things these companies do still makes me wonder how the hell their developers managed to build it.

Me too, I work in the internetworking side of the house, routing and switching, and when you see new routers show up with 100Gbps interfaces, and with backplane forwarding rates in the Terabits/sec you can't help be in awe. Sometimes I expect the thing to burst and the room to fill up with zeros and ones.

 

[gofer_touch]

I am not sure but I think this is the video that might be being referred to:

NYCBSDCon 2014: Serving one-third of the Internet via FreeBSD

I found it pretty interesting that they actually aren't making use of ZFS, but instead relying on UFS and higher level redundancy via multiple nodes.

 

[kpa]

That's not very surprising because ZFS is designed to provide only local redundancy. Anything bigger you have to build more infrastructure on top of the filesystems used and then it no longer matters if you use ZFS or UFS.

 

[Beastie7]

I'd like to see FreeBSD more on the client/app development side of infrastructure instead of just as a backbone. The heavy bias towards Linux for web development is annoying.

Also, Java needs to die in a fire.