A three-day database outage in 2008 started Netflix's move to AWS. It finished in January 2016, after rebuilding a monolith into hundreds of microservices, with billing and customer data moved last. What they chose and why, and which of those choices a normal company should copy.
August 2008: a major database corruption stopped Netflix shipping DVDs for three days. The lesson they drew was to move away from vertically scaled single points of failure such as one large relational database.
They chose not to lift and shift, which in their words would have moved all the problems and limitations of the data center into the cloud. They rebuilt instead.
All customer-facing services were in the cloud before 2015. Billing and customer and employee data management moved last. The final data center pieces were shut down in early January 2016, seven years in.
By then Netflix had eight times as many streaming members as in 2008, viewing had grown by three orders of magnitude, availability was approaching four nines, and cost per stream was a fraction of the data center's, which they called a welcome side benefit rather than the goal.
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As of October 25, 2026. Provided as is, for general information, and accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown. Not legal, compliance, tax, financial or other professional advice. Prices, limits and vendor services change; check current vendor documentation before relying on anything here. Terms of use.