nanog mailing list archives
RE: FYI Netflix is down
From: Ryan Malayter <malayter () gmail com>
Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2012 09:58:22 -0500
James Downs wrote:
For Netflix (and all other similar services) downtime is money and money is downtime. There is a quantifiable cost for customer acquisition and a quantifiable churn during each minute of downtime. Mature organizations actually calculate and track this. The trick is to ensure that you have balanced the cost of greater redundancy vs the cost of churn/customer acquisition. If you are spending too much on redundancy, it's as big of mistake as spending too little.
Actually, for Netflix, so long as downtime is infrequent or short enough that users don't cancel, it actually saves them money. They're not paying royalties for movies being streamed during downtime, but they're still collecting their $8/month. There is no meaningful SLA for the end user to my knowledge. I imagine the threshold for *any* user churn based on downtime is very high for Netflix. So long as they are "about as good as cable/sattelite TV" in terms of uptime Netflix will do fine. You would have to get into 98% uptime or lower before people would really start getting irritated enough to cancel. Of course multiple short outages would be more painful than a few longer ones from a customer's perspective. I imagine Netflix is mature enough to track this data as you suggest, and that's why they use AWS - downtime isn't a big deal for their business unless it gets really, really bad.
Current thread:
- Re: FYI Netflix is down, (continued)
- Re: FYI Netflix is down George Herbert (Jul 02)
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- Re: FYI Netflix is down Greg D. Moore (Jul 02)
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- RE: FYI Netflix is down Dan Golding (Jul 02)
- Re: FYI Netflix is down George Herbert (Jul 02)
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- Re: FYI Netflix is down George Herbert (Jul 02)
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- Re: FYI Netflix is down Greg D. Moore (Jul 02)
- Re: FYI Netflix is down Steven Bellovin (Jul 02)
- Re: FYI Netflix is down Jay Ashworth (Jul 03)
- Re: FYI Netflix is down George Herbert (Jul 03)
- Re: FYI Netflix is down Jon Lewis (Jul 03)
- Re: FYI Netflix is down Rodrick Brown (Jul 03)
- RE: FYI Netflix is down Dan Golding (Jul 06)
- Re: FYI Netflix is down James Downs (Jul 06)
- Re: FYI Netflix is down steve pirk [egrep] (Jul 08)
- Re: FYI Netflix is down Ryan Malayter (Jul 08)
- Re: FYI Netflix is down Rayson Ho (Jul 09)
- Re: FYI Netflix is down Dave Hart (Jul 09)
- Re: FYI Netflix is down steve pirk [egrep] (Jul 11)