GTAC 2015: Enabling Streaming Experiments at Netflix

http://g.co/gtac Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1K16NtKd-vqdjFmMVVOJusSmBTXJESTxNPXF4s36BjXI/pub Minal Mishra (Netflix) 69+ million user's streaming experience is of paramount importance to Netflix. In order to swiftly improve this, we moved the adaptive streaming algorithms into the Javascript layer. This posed a unique challenge of frequently releasing client javascript software which directly impacted consumer's streaming experience. Borrowing the continuous delivery paradigm, which has been widely and successfully adopted for service applications, we used it to retire risk over the lifecycle of a checkin and deliver updates frequently. In this talk we will describe a key component of this paradigm to enable software updates. We will dive into rollout procedure of the javascript client and tools to accurately compare the health against the current version. We will also share the challenges faced with this process.