The Netflix Content Delivery System

At Netflix we're in the middle of building the world's largest content delivery network for online streaming. The basic building block of this network is our OpenConnect Appliance (OCA), which is a custom-designed Intel server-class box containing approx 100TB of disk storage and 2-4 10GbE network adapters. These boxes are clustered together to create partial and full copies of our online library, and positioned around the country (and the world) to bring the content closer to ISPs and users. Each OCA box is meant to handle 5,000-10,000 streams at once right now, but my team's job is to improve the OS and software to double or triple this load in the future using the same hardware. This presents some very interesting computer science scaling problems in regards to CPU partitioning and usage, data flows through the OS, disk scheduling, hardware vs software offload of functionality, etc.