How Netflix Serves Viewing Data?

Motivation

How to keep users' viewing data in scale (billions of events per day)?

Here, viewing data means...

1. viewing history. What titles have I watched?
2. viewing progress. Where did I leave off in a given title?
3. on-going viewers. What else is being watched on my account right now?

Architecture

The viewing service has two tiers:

1. stateful tier = active views stored in memory

   • Why? to support the highest volume read/write
   • How to scale out?
     • partitioned into N stateful nodes by account_id mod N
       • One problem is that load is not evenly distributed and hence the system is subject to hot spots
     • CP over AP in CAP theorem, and there is no replica of active states.
       • One failed node will impact 1/nth of the members. So they use stale data to degrade gracefully.

2. stateless tier = data persistence = Cassandra + Memcached

   • Use Cassandra for very high volume, low latency writes.
     • Data is evenly distributed. No hot spots because of consistent hashing with virtual nodes to partition the data.
   • Use Memcached for very high volume, low latency reads.
     • How to update the cache?
       • after writing to Cassandra, write the updated data back to Memcached
       • eventually consistent to handling multiple writers with a short cache entry TTL and a periodic cache refresh.
     • in the future, prefer Redis' appending operation to a time-ordered list over "read-modify-writes" in Memcached.