Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

Every time a big company screws up, there are two highly informed sets of people who are guaranteed to be lurking, but rarely post, in a thread like this:

1) those directly involved with the incident, or employees of the same company. They have too much to lose by circumventing the PR machine.

2) people at similar companies who operate similar systems with similar scale and risks. Those people know how hard this is and aren’t likely to publicly flog someone doing their same job based on uninformed speculation. They know their own systems are Byzantine and don’t look like what random onlookers think it would look like.

So that leaves the rest, who offer insights based on how stuff works at a small scale, or better yet, pronouncements rooted in “first principles.”

Right? A common complaint by outsiders is that Netflix uses microservices. I'd love to hear exactly how a monolith application is guaranteed to perform better, with details. What is the magic difference that would have ensured the live stream would have been successful?

I doubt a "microservice" has anything to do with delivering the video frames. There are specific kinds of infrastructure tech that are specifically designed to serve live video to large amounts of clients. If they are in fact using a "microservice" to deliver video frames, then I'd ask them to have their heads examined. Microservices are typically used to do mundane short-lived tasks, not deliver video.

There’s very likely a dedicated service for delivering frames.

That’s service would technically be a “microservice” even if it is a large service.

Why is that “very likely”?

I’m genuinely curious about the reasoning behind that statement. It’s very possible that you are using a different set of assumptions or definitions than I am.

I say that because, for performance reasons, you’d never want to wait on potentially several hops to stream media and because the act of streaming could very well be a good enough domain boundary.

I'm fairly well versed in basic ip networks, but the above sounds like a wordsalad to me.

That’s okay, you probably just haven’t worked with high performance services or micro services before.

Network requests (sometimes called hops) take a significant amount of time. You don’t want your streaming service to take a significant amounts of time.

In microservices land, you generally try making services based on some “domain” (metaphorical, not like a literal domain name) which defines the responsibility of any given service. Defining these domains is more art than science and depends on the business needs and each team.

Video streaming might be one of those domains for Netflix.