Microservices

Netflix Play API - An Evolutionary Architecture

QCon: What is the focus of your work today?

Suudhan: I work on the Playback API team whose identity is to deliver Playback Functionality 24/7. I, along with a team of stunning colleagues, own and operate the critical Play API service which orchestrates playback functions like deciding the best playback experience, authorize every playback and collect playback data for business intelligence. For the past 2 years, i lead the initiative to re-architect this service to significantly improve our scalability, availability and developer velocity.

QCon: What’s the motivation for this talk?

Suudhan: Our API service have gone through 3 architectures. With Netflix scale, we often hit limitations of our architecture every 3 or so years. In this third iteration, we have architected a solution to optimize for evolvability. We fully expect things to change in 3-5 years time and we want an architecture in which each aspect of the architecture can be replaced with minimal overhead. My motivation for the talk is to share our learnings with this architecture and have an exchange of ideas with the qCon audience. I am particularly interested in hearing opinions about aspects which we might have overlooked or how some elements of our architecture can be applied to different domains.