Netflix CEO likens cloud computing to early coding era

December 02, 2012

Reed Hastings, CEO of video streaming company Netflix, says that the current state of cloud computing is akin to the era before compilers took some of the heavy lifting away from coding. Netflix started its move to Amazon's cloud in late 2009, and according to Hastings, who addressed the recent AWS re:Invent customer conference in Las Vegas, 95 percent of the company's computation and storage is provided by Amazon Web Services. CEO Reed Hastings with relics from Netflix's early days, before streaming. "We've got some remaining low value systems that we haven't yet converted but we hope by the end of next year to be the largest business in the world that's 100 percent on AWS outside Amazon retail," Hastings said. Hastings said that Netflix was ahead of its time when it started to shift to the cloud, but it had little choice due to extraordinary growth. "So streaming at that time in 2008 was about a million hours a month and now it's about a billion hours a month," Hastings said. "So we've had this thousandfold ramp up in computational resources necessary over just four years ... and so we had to take some risks. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.techworld.com.au/article/443251/netflix_ceo_cloud_currently_akin_pre-compiler_era/?fp=16&fpid=1