The journey to becoming a cloud native company at Netflix was impressive, and continues to yield benefits for Netflix and its customers. The growth Netflix was enjoying around 2010 and beyond made it difficult for them to logistically keep up with the demand for additional hardware and the capacity to run and scale their systems. They quickly realized that they were an entertainment creation and distribution company, and not a data center operations company. Knowing that managing an ever-growing number of data centers around the world would continue to cause huge capital outflows and require a focus that was not core to their customers, they made their cloud-first decision.

Elasticity of the cloud is possibly the key benefit for Netflix, as it allows them to add thousands of instances and petabytes of storage, on demand, as their customer base grows and usage increases. This reliance on the cloud's ability to provide resources as required also includes their big data and analytics processing engines, video transcoding, billing, payments, and many other services that make their business run. In addition to the scale and elasticity that the cloud brings, Netflix also cites the cloud as away to significantly increase their services availability. They were able to use the cloud to distribute their workloads across zones and geographies that use fundamentally unreliable but redundant components to achieve their desired 99.99% availability of services.

Finally, while cost was not a key driver for their decision to move to the cloud, their costs per streaming start ended up being a fraction of what it was when they managed their own data centers. This was a very beneficial side effect of the scale they were able to achieve, and the benefit was only possible due to the elasticity of the cloud. Specifically, this enabled them to continuously optimize instance type mix and to grow and shrink our footprint near-instantaneously without the need to maintain large capacity buffers. We can also benefit from the economies of scale that are only possible in a large cloud ecosystem. These benefits have enabled Netflix to have a laser focus on their customer and business requirements, and not spend resources on areas that do not directly impact that business mission.