Understanding design of microservices architecture at Netflix.

Have you ever wondered about the powerhouse behind your 4K binge-watching sessions? I’m talking about Netflix’s smooth, almost seamless global streaming service. It all comes down to the sophisticated microservices architecture design at Netflix.

This is no ordinary architectural masterpiece; it’s a symphony of over 1,000 small services working in harmony, like an orchestra playing Mozart.

I’ll let you in on something: this wasn’t always easy for them. But when they got it right… It became their ultimate competitive advantage! Their microservices architecture became their magic wand!

We’re diving into how this system works and why it matters to us (and Netflix!). By sticking around, you’ll learn about its benefits, the challenges faced by Netflix during implementation, and the modern components that make up this system in 2025.

Sit tight as we embark on this exciting journey through the digital labyrinth of microservices at Netflix.

Key Takeaways

This is How Netflix Microservices Architecture Works in an IT Infrastructure

Although Netflix was launched in 1997 as a DVD rental startup, it took eight years to fully realize the power of the cloud. In 2008, due to the heavy demand for DVDs, Netflix began an infrastructure transformation that shut down its in-house data center and business operations for 3-4 days, forcing it to embrace scalable, robust data infrastructure management.

And then everything changed.

Since then, Netflix has wholeheartedly adopted AWS (Amazon Web Services) for managing its entire application and IT infrastructure, and it replaced its existing monolithic architecture hosted on its data servers with a loosely coupled microservices architecture hosted on the public cloud.

By switching to a microservices-based architecture powered by the AWS public cloud, a model now standard in cloud consulting services, they eliminated single points of failure. This created an extremely scalable IT infrastructure capable of supporting billions of daily requests without service interruptions.

Unprecedented Scalability With Microservices-Based System Architecture

In Netflix’s microservices-based architecture, extensive software programs are broken down into smaller programs or components based on modularity, and every such part has its own data encapsulation.

If microservices share the same database, it causes them to be dependent on each other. By avoiding this, Netflix can scale its different services independently and rapidly via horizontal scaling and workload partitioning as part of new features of the microservices-based architecture.

If any smaller software program is not working or slows down system requests, engineers can quickly isolate that component to ensure uninterrupted service. Granular tracking of every individual software component is also easier with this architecture.

Data Hosting and Content Delivery Network

As per 2025 reports and blogs by renowned experts, Netflix’s system infrastructure has two main components:

• AWS (Amazon Web Services) for hosting application logic and data centers.
• Netflix Open Connect, an in-house global network for content delivery that serves 100% of video traffic.

Both components should work concurrently and in sync to deliver timely content and streaming services.

Regarding software architecture, the Netflix delivery architecture has three critical components: Client, Backend, and Content Delivery Network (CDN).

While the client can be any supported browser, Smart TV, gaming console, or mobile app, the backend comprises AWS-based services, databases, and storage, which handles everything besides streaming videos.

Some critical part of Netflix’s backend contains:

Some critical parts of Netflix’s backend in 2025 include:

• AWS EC2 and Titus (Netflix’s container management platform) for scalable computing.
• AWS S3, which is a scalable storage
• Spinnaker for continuous delivery and deployment of code changes.
• Business logic microservices, which are custom-built and task-oriented frameworks
• AWS Aurora PostgreSQL, AWS DynamoDB, and Cassandra, which are scalable database structures
• Kafka, Hadoop, Spark, and Flink for big data processing and real-time analytics.
• Video processing tools (like the internal ‘Cosmos’ platform) and the AV1 codec for high-efficiency video compression.
• And finally, the Open Connect CDN, a robust network of servers, is deployed for streaming and storing videos on a mass scale.

These are called Open Connect Appliances (OCAs), and they are optimized for seamless performance in data centers via fast streaming of video and fast retrieval of this video based on the service requests.

Infrastructure for Video Playback

So, what exactly happens when a user clicks or taps on the playback button?

A chain of events is triggered instantly:

1. Open Connect Appliances (OCAs) constantly share their health reports with the Open Connect Control Plane, detailing their workload status, routability, and available videos. This way, the system knows which OCAs are healthy and must be sent to the clients.
2. The play request is sent from the Client to the Playback Apps running on AWS (often orchestrated by Titus) to fetch the URLs of the requested video.
3. Playback Apps then validate the request by checking the user’s subscription status, content licensing, and geographic restrictions.
4. After validation, the Steering service communicates with Playback Apps to identify eligible OCAs for that specific video request. Steering runs on AWS and accelerates this process. It uses the user’s IP address, ISP information, and real-time network performance to find the best OCAs.
5. Finally, the Playback apps send a list of optimal OCAs to the client for streaming that video. The client chooses the best OCA based on latency, speed, and reliability to stream the video for the user.

Amazingly, all these steps happen within milliseconds, ensuring the video starts almost instantly.

Decoding Backend Netflix Architecture

As shared earlier, the backend comprises databases, storage, and everything besides the streaming process that Playback apps handle.

Here, a microservices-based infrastructure is also deployed for handling backend activities, and other services include user management, billing, subscription management, video transcoding, personalized user recommendations (enhanced by Generative AI services), and more.

Here is the current backend infrastructure of Netflix microservices in 2025, based on current reports and engineering blogs:

Now, this is what happens during one service request placed for the backend infrastructure:

• AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) handles the request for Playback sent by the Client to the backend, running on AWS.
• AWS ALB will then forward this request to the Edge Gateway (formerly Zuul, now often Zuul 2 or Envoy-based) running on AWS EC2 instances. This Edge Gateway handles TLS termination, dynamic routing, traffic monitoring, security, and data safety, besides ensuring zero points of failure.
• From the Edge Gateway, the request is forwarded to the Federated GraphQL Gateway. Netflix has shifted from a monolithic API to a Federated GraphQL architecture.
• The GraphQL Gateway orchestrates the request by querying the relevant Domain Graph Services (DGS). In our example, the request for Playback is routed to the Playback DGS. Other corresponding DGSs are deployed for further requests, such as user authentication or subscription checks.
• Now, the Playback DGS will call a microservice or a sequence of microservices to fulfill this request. Internal orchestration is often managed by the Netflix Conductor or similar tools.
• Adaptive Concurrency Limits and libraries like Resilience4j (replacing legacy Hystrix) isolate every microservice from the other. This enables unprecedented resilience by rejecting excess traffic intelligently to prevent cascading failures.
• Microservices also emit events to the Keystone and Mantis data platforms. Keystone handles massive-scale data pipelines for analytics, while Mantis provides real-time operational insights.
• The processed data is then fed to big data processing tools such as AWS S3, Apache Iceberg, Spark, and Cassandra for the following action.

This is how Netflix’s infrastructure works, serving clients’ requests and delivering a powerful performance.

In the next part, we will decode the components of Netflix’s microservices infrastructure and more.

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