Netflix’s Strategic Approach To Efficient, Scalable, and Resilient Data Deletion

In large-scale systems, data deletion is a complex challenge that touches infrastructure, reliability, and performance. As data spreads across diverse data stores, ensuring timely and consistent deletion becomes increasingly difficult. Without a central strategy, teams often build isolated solutions, leading to fragmented behavior, inconsistent processes, and increased operational overhead.

At Netflix, we have developed an innovative architecture for managing data deletion across multiple data stores, effectively addressing these challenges while improving overall system efficiency. The centralized and extensible platform automates the entire lifecycle—from detection and auditing to verification and deletion—while providing observability, journaling, a recovery mechanism, and configurable deletion rate controls to ensure safe and reliable operation at scale.

In this talk, we will present the architectural design and execution strategies behind the system. We will share how we used various technologies to build a reliable and auditable deletion framework, and discuss key engineering tradeoffs, including how we balanced throughput, safety, and achieved scalability across diverse systems, while maintaining operational resilience with live incoming traffic.

By the end of the talk, you will:

• Learn about the challenges of managing deletions across diverse and large-scale operational data stores
• Understand why a standardized approach is critical for reliable and scalable data deletion
• See how central teams can enable deletion through platform-managed orchestration and shared infrastructure
• Explore Netflix’s architectural strategies for solving datastore-specific challenges and scaling deletion workflows
• Gain practical insights from real-world engineering decisions and trade-offs made in production