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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday May 01 2019, @11:03AM   Printer-friendly
from the snakes-on-a-stream dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow2736

Netflix: Python programming language is behind every film you stream

The next time you're streaming on Netflix, you can thank popular programming language Python and the developers who use it for much of the experience. 

According to Python developers at Netflix, the language is used through the "full content lifecycle", from security tools, to its recommendation algorithms, and its proprietary content distribution network (CDN) Open Connect, which ensures that content is streamed from network devices that are as close as possible to end users. 

[...] At Netflix, many of the network devices that make up its CDN are "mostly managed by Python applications", which do tasks like tracking the inventory of network devices, their health and location.     

"Python has long been a popular programming language in the networking space because it's an intuitive language that allows engineers to quickly solve networking problems," notes Netflix senior software engineer, Amjith Ramanujam. 

The momentum behind the language is driven by useful libraries that get developed, he adds. These include the NumPy and SciPy libraries for Python, which Netflix uses to perform numerical analysis for its failover services. It's also a heavy user of Redis Queue and Jupyter Notebooks tools for Python.  

Netflix also uses the Boto 3 AWS SDK for Python configure its AWS infrastructure. Netflix runs on mostly on AWS infrastructure and last year spent $1.3bn on technology and development.

And of course Python is used extensively within Netflix's machine-learning algorithms for things like content recommendations, artwork personalization, and marketing. 


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