Design Netflix Playback Availability · System Design Interview

Design Netflix Playback AvailabilityDesign the control path behind the play button at Netflix’s size — everything between pressing play and the first byte arriving — under the rule that it keeps working while an entire region is failing. Availability, resilience and graceful degradation are the whole exercise.What it has to do

Pressing play returns the manifest, the licence and the URLs needed to start the video

Playback keeps starting while a whole region is unavailable

A dependency that is slow or down degrades the experience rather than stopping it

Scale

Members: 300 million

Playback starts per day: 1 billion

Out of scope

Encoding and the content pipeline

Recommendations and the home page

Billing and sign-up

The CDN’s internals

Digital rights management itself

Practise this challengeAll system design challenges

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