Evolution of the Netflix API

Location:

Bayview A/B

Track:

Time:

Monday, 1:35pm - 2:25pm

Abstract:

Netflix streaming has been growing tremendously, now reaching more than 38M subscribers in over 40 countries. These subscribers are enjoying Netflix on more than 1,000 different device types, ranging from game consoles to set-top boxes, TVs and mobile devices. This is all made possible by a complex service-oriented architecture that handles billions of requests a day from those devices. At the center of that architecture is the Netflix API, which is the front door to the entire system.

This presentation will describe how the Netflix API evolved from a typical one-size-fits-all RESTful API designed to support public developers into a web service platform optimized to handle the diversity and variability of each device and user experience. The presentation will also address the challenges involving operations, deployment, performance, fault-tolerance, and rate of innovation at massive scale.

Ben Christensen

Ben Christensen is a software engineer on the Netflix Edge Services Platform team responsible for fault tolerance, performance, architecture and scale while enabling millions of customers to access the Netflix experience across more than 1,000 different device types. Interests include building maintainable, performant, high-volume, high-impact systems which has recently led to functional and reactive programming styles, polyglot codebases and open source projects such as Hystrix (https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix) and RxJava (https://github.com/Netflix/RxJava). Prior to Netflix, Ben was at Apple making iOS apps and media available on the iTunes store.