Netflix's Move to the Cloud and its Risks

Netflix is one of the examples that public cloud based services will serve as the driving force in the transformation of in-house IT operations.

Netflix has decided that they no longer need an on-premise datacenter to support their in-house corporate IT services, and have started shifting internal applications to Amazon’s cloud, while also migrating several operations to SaaS.

The Rationale of the Move

The idea is to ensure that the company’s IT operations is focused on providing services instead of managing hardware. The company believes that even if he doesn’t eliminate the company’s need for a datacenter completely, the worst case scenario is that it’ll be left with a few racks running lots of virtual servers, which should be small enough to fit in a small space instead of a server farm that runs thousands of virtual servers and takes up an entire floor.

But Has Amazon Learned from Its Mistakes?

The question is whether the Amazon has learned from its past mistakes so as to not allow a system failure to bring down the entire administrative backend of Netflix. Amazon, although the biggest, is far from being a perfect cloud, the recent power outage showed us all that. For one, Netflix used to enjoy their CDN which were located in different hosting companies around the world. It allows them control over their own operation.

This move will essentially put their entire administrative operation on Amazon’s backend. That’s a big show of confidence.

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