Migrating to Cassandra in the Cloud, the Netflix Way

Netflix grew up using the traditional enterprise model for scaling: monolithic web application on top of a monolithic database in a single datacenter, buying bigger boxes, stuffing more user data into session memory. It all worked great when Netflix had less than 1 million customers (and rapidly growing). Then one day that model failed us, miserably. The single-point-of-failure bug hit us hard, and we were hobbled for days. Since then, Netflix has reinvented it's technology stack from top to bottom - abandoning the single, monolithic web application for tiered distributed services, as well as moving beyond our SPOF database to more resilient architectures.

In this talk I'll be discussing my involvement with Cassandra at Netflix, first as a user of this new system, then as a developer of it. I'll discuss how we migrated from our traditional datacenter to the cloud, how we store and backup data, and the problems of rapidly scaling out a persistence layer under a burgeoning distributed architecture.