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Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

My prediction is that by 2020 Netflix will move a significant portion of their IT to Google Cloud.

Why? Most of their architecture is microservices / linux containers / serverless, and Google is simply way better positioned there (with Kubernetes as their crown jewel). They will eventually win.

Source: no source, just my "expert" opinion (6 years at AWS, 2 at VMware's cloud, currently CEO at a startup).

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Another reason is the rumor that Google is going to make their own chips for their Cloud, possibly ARM based. This could have big cost savings with some applications. Video streaming and encoding are one of them.

Isn't Netflix invested heavily on Mesos than k8s for their container orchestration? for example Titus https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/tagged/titus Fenzo https://github.com/Netflix/Fenzo

While that might be the case, I wouldn’t be surprised if they let teams play with k8s as well. Besides, one should always look at these choices objectively; if Google + k8s is a better deal overall than AWS & Mesos, then you shouldnt let your earlier investments cloud your judgement.

I know both Kubernetes and Mesos quite well. To be frank, they're on two different levels - and I assume the smart(er than me) guys at Netflix know that as well.

Kubernetes is a huge deal here. The big move to containerization makes GCP very attractive to new infrastructure.

How big doesn’t netflix have to get before it’s in their best interests to build data centers of their own?

Toolchains are maturing. They’ve figured out ways to get multiple uses from the same hardware. They shouldn’t be beholden to the rollout or geographical plans of two cloud providers.

I don’t even mean build out their entire infrastructure. I think even running your base load on your own hardware makes you understand your cloud situation much more profoundly.

They have data centers of their own and distribute all of their own content. AWS powers the UI requests and their back office number crunching stuff. Everything after you push play is done via Netflix's own hardware.

Any links so I can read more on the subject? I’d love to get my hands on some material describing their infrastructure.

https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-...

That seems to be more about their edge caches, which is interesting [and partly answers one of bad assumptions] but not the same.

They _had_ their own datacenters, and decided to move their control plane to the cloud (AWS) to avoid having to run the those datacenters themselves.

https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-net...

This was a big deal in 2008 :)

(Maybe there's an even bigger size where it no longer makes sense for them to outsource this, but bidding GCP and AWS against each other seems like a reasonable strategy for their use-case).

AWS is catching up as far as Kubernetes support. I might agree that GCP is better positioned for some of that architecture, but they are still comparable. There are also some advantages to AWS. For example, I think that their RDS product is still more mature than Google Cloud SQL.

It's all trade-offs.

+1 regarding RDS. A company I spoke to is moving from GCP to AWS, with their biggest pain point being Cloud SQL is WAY less flexible than RDS. While GCP's k8s offering is better/easier to use, they still have some catching up to do.

To drive the second point home, GCP recently released VPC Flow Logs, while AWS has had it for a good while now.

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