Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Me too. This feels like "oooh, shiny!" from high levels, not engineering needs. You shouldn't outsource your core competency, and this feels like what they are doing.

I say "feel" advisedly. I don't have inner knowledge. It's just that the explanation up to this point doesn't seem all that compelling; for what seems like rather dubious benefits it seems like they've taken on an awful lot of risks they have little ability to manage themselves.

View on HN

This came up in the first entry. Netflix would apparently dispute your take on their core competency.

http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/four-reasons-we-choose-a...

The problems [Amazon] are trying to solve are incredibly difficult ones, but they aren’t specific to our business. Every successful internet company has to figure out great storage solutions, hardware failover, networking infrastructure, etc.

Their third argument for virtualized infrastructure was "We're not very good at predicting customer growth or device engagement", which strikes me as a compelling problem to solve. Having to change their approach to managing service dependencies and failures doesn't seem like too high a price to pay.

Yes, I read the first entry. The use case that particularly came to mind when I said it seemed like they were outsourcing their core competency was actually the location of data centers and other such physical constraints, like peering arrangements. They're stuck with Amazon's decisions on that front. Granted they're probably large enough to get Amazon to do whatever it is they need to do, heck they can probably all but simply purchase a new data center and announce to Amazon that Amazon now has a new data center to manage :), but it still seems like an odd choice of control to release.

the location of data centers and other such physical constraints, like peering arrangements

This is not Netflix's core competency either. This is the core competency of a CDN. If you have problems like this, you should almost certainly hire one, and architect accordingly.

Netflix has long since done so:

http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/201...

Actually Netflix now uses Level3's (level3.com) CDN: http://www.level3.com/index.cfm?pageID=491&PR=958

Notice how they say - "primary content delivery network", primary not sole.

netflix actually uses many cdns, including akamai and l3.

No, they still use Akamai (dig cdn-0.nflximg.com to verify), but they are planning on moving to Level3 (assuming the Comcast/Level3 fight doesn't sour that deal too badly).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com