Approaching container adoption in an already cloud-native infrastructure

IN 2008, NETFLIX went all-in on cloud migration and began moving its entire internally hosted infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Today almost all of Netflix runs on virtual machines (VMs) in AWS. A customer’s catalog browsing experience, content recommendation calculations, and payments are all served from AWS. Over the years Netflix has helped craft many cloudnative patterns, such as loosely coupled microservices and immutable infrastructure that have become industry best practices. The all-in migration to the cloud has been hugely successful for Netflix. Despite already having a successful cloud-native architecture,Netflix is investing in container technology. Container technology enables Netflix to follow many of the same patterns already employed for VMs but in a simpler, more flexible, and efficient way. Some of the factors driving this investment include: End-to-end application packaging. Container images used for local development are identical (or at least very similar) to those that are run in production. This packaging allows developers to build and test applications more easily in a production-like environment, which improves reliability and reduces development overhead. Flexible packaging. Netflix has historically provided a Java virtual machine (JVM)-oriented development and deployment environment, using Titus: Introducing Containers to the Netflix Cloud DOI:10.1145/3152529