Netflix's Architecture Story Isn't Really About Microservices
The most interesting part of Netflix's stack isn't the microservices at scale — it's Open Connect, their custom-built CDN.
I always assumed Netflix's architecture story was "microservices at scale" — hundreds of services, AWS, done. The more interesting part turned out to be something else entirely: Open Connect, Netflix's own CDN.
Shipping hardware into ISP networks
Open Connect ships physical caching servers directly into ISP networks, for free. Close to 95% of Netflix's traffic globally is delivered through direct connections between these appliances and residential ISPs.
Why own the edge
It's not really a "CDN choice" in the usual sense — it's a deliberate bet that content delivery is core enough to Netflix's business to own the hardware rather than rent someone else's edge network.
That bet is justified by the shape of their traffic: enormous, predictable, write-once-watch-many. A handful of files get requested by millions of people, over and over, which makes owning the last mile of delivery worth the operational overhead that renting would have avoided.