Dive Brief:

• Last August, Netflix announced plans to shut down the last of its data centers by the end of the summer and to move all of its information technology to the public cloud. The company was one of the first major organizations to do so. 
• Netflix chose Amazon Web Services as their cloud provider because it provided them with “the greatest scale and the broadest set of services and features,” the company said. 
• This week, Netflix said it had finally fully completed its cloud migration after shutting down its last data center bits used by its streaming service. 

Dive Insight:

Netflix began its move to the cloud in 2008, after experiencing a major database corruption that stopped DVD shipments for three days. 

“We realized that we had to move away from vertically scaled single points of failure, like relational databases in our datacenter, towards highly reliable, horizontally scalable, distributed systems in the cloud,” said Yury Izrailevsky, vice president, Cloud and Platform Engineering, in the company's blog post. 

Izrailevsky said it took the company a full seven years to complete the migration to the cloud because the company chose a cloud-native approach, rebuilding virtually all their technology and “fundamentally changing the way we operate the company.”

“Moving to the cloud was a lot of hard work, and we had to make a number of difficult choices along the way,” he said.

Moving to the cloud has brought Netflix a number of benefits, Izrailevsky said, including eight times as many streaming members. The use of public cloud will likely continue to grow among businesses over the next several years, with some large companies potentially following Netflix’s lead.