By Dhruv PratapIntroductionOrganizations that have been around for a while usually run two identity systems side by side. One belongs to the cloud provider: IAM roles, instance profiles, execution roles. The other is your own, and it is the one your internal services actually check when they decide whether to answer a request.On infrastructure you build yourself, you can bootstrap your own identity however you like. On managed compute you cannot. The provider hands your process a cloud identity and nothing else.This post describes how we close that gap for Apache Spark workloads running on…
By Emma Yanyang Kong, Aditya Deshpande, Asad Abbasi, Bowei Yan, David Fagnan, Ashish Rastogi, Dhaval Patel, Ray ZhangIntroductionThe Netflix experience is a journey of discovery. Every visual cue, from the artwork on a title to the video previews that autoplay while you browse, is there to connect you with a story you will love. We call these visual cues assets, and choosing the right one for each member is a personalization problem of its own. But which image or video preview of Squid Game should we show you? And what do we do right after a title launches, when there’s far too little…
Samuel Yeboah, Francesco Di Chiara and Mingliang LiuToday, Netflix runs two Flink autoscalers. That is exactly one more than we want. We built the first one in-house years ago, when there was no mature option suited to our platform. The second came from the Apache Flink community, and it can scale workloads our homegrown system was never designed for. We now run both in production and are steadily converging on the open-source one. Along the way we learned some hard lessons about metrics, cost, and the real price of maintaining infrastructure you could instead adopt, and we hope they are…
How and Why Netflix Built a Real-Time Distributed Graph: Part 3 — Querying the graph with gRPC execution APIAuthors: Nilesh Mishra and Ajit KotiThis is the third entry of a multi-part blog series describing how we built a Real-Time Distributed Graph (RDG). In Part 1, we discussed the motivation for creating the RDG and the architecture of the data processing pipeline that populates it. In Part 2, we discussed how we designed the storage layer to handle billions of nodes and edges while maintaining single-digit-millisecond latency. In Part 3, we will explore how we designed a fast, flexible…
by Aarti Laddha, Richard Diaz-Cool, Rishika Idnani, Venkatesh SelverajNetflix supports a vast and evolving set of features and content types, ranging from 4K streaming and immersive audio to live streaming and cloud gaming, across a diverse ecosystem of devices. However, not all devices are created equal. Hardware limitations such as available RAM, CPU cores, display capabilities, or platform support mean that some features cannot be supported on certain device models. To ensure the best possible user experience, we rely on a deep understanding of device capabilities. We have invested in…
Authors: Ying Li, Arjun Rao, Shradha SehgalIntroductionRecommendations sit at the heart of the Netflix experience. Our current production models rely on thousands of hand‑crafted features over users, items, and interactions, along with specialized architectures for sequence modeling, feature interactions, and multi‑task objectives. This stack has evolved over many years to support diverse content types (movies, series, games, live, podcasts) and product surfaces, but its complexity makes it costly to onboard new use cases: adding a content type or surface can require significant feature…
By AI Platform’s Model Runtime team and Inference teamIntroductionMost organizations consume LLMs through hosted APIs. Netflix went further — we run the full stack ourselves, from model deployment through inference, inside our existing production environment rather than a separate ML silo. Some of those decisions weren’t obvious, and a few revealed their trade-offs only under production load.This post focuses on the choices where alternatives were seriously considered: engine selection, model packaging, API surface design, deployment strategy, and output constraints enforcement. The goal is…
By Parth Jain, Rakesh Sukumar, Yingwu Zhao, Renzo Sanchez-Silva & Nathan FisherA deep dive into the engineering challenges of building a real-time service dependency map at Netflix scale: from streaming architectures and distributed aggregation pipelines to time-travel queries and the methodology that made it work.IntroductionIn our first post, we introduced the problem: engineers at Netflix needed a unified, real-time view of service dependencies to troubleshoot faster, understand blast radius, and navigate our distributed architecture. We described our multi-source approach, combining eBPF…
Authors: Lequn Wang, Jiangwei Pan, and Linas BaltrunasFigure 1. Autoregressive homepage generation. GenPage builds a Netflix homepage one row or entity at a time, each one conditioned on what’s already on the page and the user’s context.IntroductionThe Netflix homepage is the first thing users see when they open the app and the primary way they discover content to enjoy. Almost every part of it is personalized, including which rows appear, which entities show up within those rows, and how everything is arranged on the page.Constructing that homepage is a genuinely hard problem. It is not…
By Zhuoning Yuan, Ta-Ying Cheng, Benjamin Klein, Bahareh AzarnoushIntroductionAt Netflix, we build technology to help storytellers bring their creative visions to life and to help members discover the stories they love.To connect stories with diverse audiences around the world, we produce promotional assets, including trailers, teasers, and social short‑form videos, that build on and elevate the original footage. Through close collaboration with the teams crafting these assets, we identified a recurring gap in current tools. Transforming raw footage into a polished final asset often requires…
By Alvin Bao, Alex Petrov, Jennifer Lai, Aidan Sherr, and Samartha ChandrashekarAs a part of the journey to transition Netflix’s compute infrastructure to be more Kubernetes-native, we have leaned into incorporating components from the Kubernetes ecosystem into our container platform Titus. One example of this is our use of Kueue, a cloud-native job queueing system for batch workloads, which has largely replaced the custom queuing and scheduling logic in our homegrown managed batch solution Compute Managed Batch (CMB). In this post, we’ll give an overview of what motivated the migration, how…
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