Today, Netflix is the 10th largest Internet company in the world. Are you aware that during the peak traffic hours more than one-third of North American Internet traffic goes through Netflix’s systems? ‘Supporting such rapid growth would have been extremely difficult out of our own data centers; we simply could not have racked the servers fast enough,’ Netflix’s blog post says. It continues, ‘Elasticity of the cloud allows us to add thousands of virtual servers and petabytes of storage within minutes, making such an expansion possible.’ So, that is the power of Amazon Web Services propelling one of the most ambitious companies on earth, Netflix, into uncharted territory and runaway success! 
Moving to the cloud has brought Netflix a number of benefits. We have eight times as many streaming members than we did in 2008, and they are much more engaged, with overall viewing growing by three orders of magnitude in eight years:
Netflix talks openly about how it uses AWS to support its streaming platform, but how much Netflix spends on AWS has always been a secret. Until now.
The thing is, every company that uses AWS and other cloud services has something called a cloud footprint. For Netflix to work, packets of data must traverse data centers, dns servers, content delivery networks, and other public cloud infrastructure.
At Intricately, we monitor the journey and volume of these packets to determine a) which cloud services a company uses and b) how much they’re being used. With this information, we can estimate a company’s “cloud spend.” Cloud spend data helps marketers at cloud-based companies qualify the right leads. Marketers can see how much a lead is spending on a competitor, how much a lead is spending on cloud technology in total, and how much a lead is spending on a certain cloud category (hosting, CDN, security, etc).
Back in 2008, Netflix was majorly working on DVD-by-mail service. Due to the above mentioned database corruption incident, DVD shipping was disrupted for three days. Netflix management decided to move to the cloud, away from relational systems in their data centers. The shift happened from vertical scaling of particular failure points to horizontal scaling of distributed systems which were highly reliable. The cloud was that of AWS (Amazon Web Services) which offered the company the ability to scale as much as they needed. Previously, Netflix team had to sit with their IT team to implement the scale up whenever their demand increased. Scalability was a huge issue with physical data warehousing. After shifting to AWS, scaling became seamless as petabytes of data could be used to stream videos within minutes, thanks to elasticity of the cloud. Based on user demand and with the help of AWS, Netflix could scale-up or down their data warehousing.
