After seven years, Netflix reports that it has finally completed its migration to Amazon Web Services. In other words, every non-AWS data center that was previously used by the company has been shut down as of January 2016 and migrated to the Amazon cloud. In a blog post by Yury Izrailevsky, Stevan Vlaovic and Ruslan Meshenberg, Netflix reports that transitioning to the cloud has brought with it a multitude of benefits such as the ability to accommodate explosive growth, cost savings that “ended up being a fraction of those in the data center,” enhanced service availability that enabled it to reach its goal of four nines of service uptime and greater operational agility. Migrating to the cloud, for example, has enabled Netflix to add “thousands of virtual servers and petabytes of storage within minutes” while accommodating growth in monthly streamlining hours in excess of a factor of 1000 between 2007 and 2015 and an eightfold rise in its population of members. The consummation of the migration of Netflix to Amazon represents a true milestone in the evolution of cloud computing given that the largest streaming video service in the world has chosen to partner with one public cloud vendor for all of its cloud computing needs. That Netflix chose Amazon represents a stunning affirmation of Amazon’s ability to scale and the richness of its features. The question now is whether Netflix will complement its partnership with Amazon with another major cloud vendor to reduce the vendor dependency risk associated with hosting its services on one vendor while concurrently recognizing the ascendancy of other players in the public cloud space.
Cloud Computing Today 