How Netflix handles it operations[System Design Sundays]
This is an often overlooked aspect of the company
Happy Sunday everyone,
As you get prepped for this upcoming week, I have the perfect resource for you to wrap up this week. Design Netflix is a question often asked at Systems Design Interviews. Most answers tend to focus on storage, video streaming, and recommendations. Which is fair. However, the reason that this happens is that most of us interact with Netflix primarily as consumers. There are other notable challenges at organizations like Netflix that we fail to consider because we are never exposed to these ideas.
Luckily the engineers at Netflix wrote a comprehensive blog post for us.Rapid Event Notification System at Netflix is their explanation of how Netflix is able to handle the billions of events pinged by the users. To me, the most interesting technical challenge they described was how Netflix handles synchronicity between different devices like Tablets, Smart TVs, and phones. Watching them describe the problem and solution was a giant “Aha!” moment for me. Let me know which part stood out to you.
As you read, I want you to focus on a few key takeaways-
Good Systems are created by using a top-down approach. By taking a high-level view of how the system would work and how users would interact with that system, we can decide what is important. Important decisions are the highest ROI. Thus, when you have limited time and resources (such as an interview), your best bet is to go for these options. Look at how Netflix Engineers used uses cases and design decisions to build a reliable system.
You have to know a lot of things- This is something I stress, but it is especially true for systems designs. Unlike Leetcode style problems, you’re very well served knowing about the recent tools and technologies in Systems Design.
Learn to work from multiple perspectives. By far the single biggest problem that holds most people back in Systems Design. They are unable to think of the system from the perspective of a developer, investor, user, etc. My article The Framework to help you Ace your System Design Interviews, is a demonstration of how this approach can help you handle tricky System Design Questions.
I’ll end on a simple note- coding interview prep is very competitive. This means that most hiring managers are looking for the littlest reason to not hire you. What this also means is that if you can work and do a little, your returns will be exponential. As long as you build up a strong foundation, and spend a little time every day learning about the industry, your interview performance and career will shoot up exponentially.
Above is part of a conversation I had with a senior manager at Amazon’s Alexa AI division. If you want to know how I even got in touch with him (and what this lead to), make sure you tune in on Saturdays.
In the comments below, share what topic you want to focus on. I’d be interested in learning and will cover them. To learn more about the newsletter, check our detailed About Page + FAQs
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Happy Prep. I’ll see you at your dream job.
System Designer,
Devansh <3
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