Launch (~50K viewers)

Netflix's signature move

Hundreds of microservices, on its own CDN

Netflix broke its monolith into hundreds of small services, each owned and scaled on its own, so a failure in one degrades a single feature rather than the whole site — and it deliberately breaks things in production to prove it. And it does not stream video from a central origin: it pushes copies out to caching appliances placed inside internet providers, so the bytes start close to the viewer instead of crossing the internet on every play.

Build it yourself

Now try building one of these architectures from a blank canvas — you're scored on the services you place and how you wire them.