I’m the type of learner that needs real life examples to understand a concept therefore reading the Gartner articles about Amazon and Netflix gave me a lot of insight into application architecture as a whole and cloud computing. For some reason, I wasn’t really considering that cloud computing can increase flexibility and agility within a company so it was helpful to gain that perspective. Amazon is a unique beast all on its own so I found the insight into Netflix to be the most valuable as Netflix started out as most traditional businesses do.

In Ross Altman and Bruce Robertson’s article, Learn a Few Lessons on Application Architecture From Netflix, they break down the article by addressing a few key recommendations. I found the below the most interesting.

• Ensure that applications are designed to run in the cloud, even if they won’t initially run in a cloud environment, to realize flexibility, scalability and elasticity. I found this point to be very interesting as I think that most organizations would find this level of forward thinking to be very difficult. I feel that usually applications are developed or designed in order to solve a specific problem therefore to also have to think about solving the problem and then also incorporating cloud capabilities that you may or may not use can be challenging. Clearly it has some benefits as incorporating that flexibility up front allowed Netflix to make a shift and scale the business quickly as consumers demanded it.
• Leverage the eventual consistency model for transaction management where user access to “slightly stale data” is acceptable to the business. Work with line-of-business executives to gain their agreement regarding the use of this model. I like this mentality because it takes a little pressure off of Netflix to be perfect. It’s kind of a fail safe and promotes the idea that “we as a company are not going to be perfect but we are going to try our best”. Within my own career in the highly demanding digital advertising industry, we were taught to never just say “no” but try to say “no, but here is what I can do” so I can completely understand from Netflix’s perspective that even though you may not be able to provide the exact solution at the time, you always need to provide alternative solutions in efforts to keep the company happy.

The infamous cloud.

You aren’t using the cloud? Maybe I will.

Source:

Altman, R., & Robertson, B. (2013, June 07). Learn a Few Lessons on Application Architecture From Netflix. Retrieved September 09, 2017, from https://www.gartner.com/doc/2509816/learn-lessons-application-architecture-netflix