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Comment by probdist | Hacker News Reader

Netflix is still running its own CDNs / using CDNs outside of Amazon.

"The company, which competes with Amazon in the video-streaming business, elected to keep control of its own content delivery network."

So Netflix is still probably doing the bulk of their traffic themselves. Application servers with AWS is probably not a huge bill versus massive video traffic.

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Fascinating. I bet they are running their own CDN to prevent Amazon from having full access to their traffic volume/streaming demand. Would be huge competitive advantage for amazon streaming if they could see per-title demand.

Or because it's cheaper.

No, it would be due to the sophisticated peering agreements - https://openconnect.netflix.com/

I was wondering about that. Open Connect was significant in the disagreement between Netflix and Comcast that spurred the net neutrality debate. Unless I'm mistaken Netflix ended up agreeing to the peering fees, though after negotiating down a bit. So does using AWS for mundane traffic actually save them money by avoiding the CDN bandwidth that Netflix has to pay ISPs to use?

AFAIK Amazon charges more for bandwidth than the greediest ISP, but I admit I haven't looked at the EB/month transfer tier.

There's literally no way to operate a CDN-like service from AWS; no matter what discount you get from Amazon, you're paying per-byte instead of 95th percentile billing and settlement-free peering.

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