Reconstructing Netflix: Build vs Rent
A Ditributed Video Streaming service
Aditya Rao, Raghuram SV, Kunal Lillaney
Overview
Netflix, in 2012, with about 30 million subscribers accounts for approximately 30% of downstream traffic in the US and has overtaken cable
tv as the favoured medium of watching media content.
We explore the potential of deploying a Netflix-like service and the challenges faced in video content delivery over the internet. We carefully analyzed
the deployment model used by Netflix and derived a conclusion that using only rented systems would not prove cost effective in the long run and will lead to complete
dependence on an external provider. On the other hand an external provider gives us the relative freedom of scaling resources depending on current demand
without actually having to constantly run them. Our system is designed to use the best of both the worlds and is deployable on both built and leased
datacenters(example Amazon AWS) in tandem.
Openstack is used to simulate Amazon's AWS, Wowza Media Server to stream content, Maxmind GeoIP to identify IP location and Spread to allocate resources.
Resources
Project Presentation
Source Code