Lessons from the Cloud

While researching the recent Microsoft Azure Storage outage I came across a presentation by Jason Chan of Netflix. While the topic was "Practical Cloud Security" there were a couple of slides that I thought applied to many organizations' situation.

We all remember how Netflix changed their business model several years ago going from mailing DVDs to streaming video online. This resulted in a 37 fold increase in API requests in one year.

Realistically most organizations don't experience that kind of growth but any organization that plans to grow should look for lessons learned.

Prior to the cloud migration Netflix was running their own data centers. Here's what they were doing in their data centers.

Sound familiar?

I especially like the "snowflake phenomenon" metaphor. That means that everything is a one-off. Nothing is reused.

Netflix's vision was to get out of the data center business and into the cloud.

We want to use clouds, not build them.

Their target patterns were much different.

Think about how this transition will reduce your costs and improve your delivery speed.

Maybe you can stream a movie in your spare time.