Design Netflix Video Streaming Platform
Design a global video streaming platform that serves millions of concurrent users with personalized recommendations and adaptive bitrate streaming.
Netflix architecture includes: (1) CDN with edge servers, (2) Adaptive bitrate encoding (ABR), (3) Recommendation engine, (4) Microservices for each domain, (5) Chaos engineering for resilience.
Think about video encoding tradeoffs
Consider CDN placement strategy
How to handle peak traffic (Friday nights)?
functional
- •Upload and encode videos
- •Stream video with adaptive quality
- •Personalized recommendations
- •Continue watching
- •Multi-device sync
- •Search and browse catalog
non functional
- •Support 200M+ concurrent streams
- •Global availability
- •< 2 second startup time
- •99.99% uptime
Architecture diagram visualization
(Diagram generation coming soon)
cdn strategy
caching
Predictive pre-caching of popular content
approach
95% of traffic served from within ISP networks
benefits
Reduced latency, lower ISP costs
open connect
Netflix's own CDN boxes in ISP datacenters
playback service
multi device
Sync watch state across devices
license service
DRM for content protection
resume watching
Store playback position in database
content ingestion
- •Upload raw video
- •Transcode to multiple formats (H.264, H.265, VP9, AV1)
- •Generate multiple bitrates (4K, 1080p, 720p, 480p)
- •Extract thumbnails and metadata
- •Upload to CDN origin
adaptive streaming
protocol
DASH or HLS
mechanism
Client measures bandwidth, requests appropriate bitrate
switching
Seamless quality changes every 2-10 seconds
manifest file
XML/M3U8 with available quality levels
recommendation engine
signals
- •Watch history
- •Ratings
- •Browse behavior
- •Similar users
- •Time of day
- •Device type
algorithms
- •Collaborative filtering
- •Content-based filtering
- •Deep learning models
- •A/B testing
personalization
Thumbnails, titles, and rankings personalized per user
users
300M subscribers worldwide
content
100,000+ titles, multiple languages/subtitles
storage
Petabytes of encoded video
bandwidth
15% of global internet traffic
s3
Video files, images
mysql
Billing, subscriptions
redis
Session data, caching
cassandra
User watch history, distributed across regions
elasticsearch
Content search
- •User Service
- •Content Service
- •Recommendation Service
- •Encoding Service
- •Playback Service
- •Billing Service
- •Analytics Service