The view from Netflix’s war room at the launch of ‘House of Cards’

Netflix just launched season two of their popular series House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey. Despite having a Netflix account, I have never actually watched it. But with all the buzz going on these past few days, it’s hard not to get seduced by it, so I’ll probably start with season one soon.

The press have been given a rare opportunity to attend the launch from behind the scenes in Netflix’s war room, so hit the link for the full story.

At the core these rollouts is a highly automated and decentralized system, where if one part breaks down, other backups and redundancies can step in to make sure things keep working.

One of the strengths of using AWS is leveraging their great infrastructure to build something globally redundant and scalable, which would be insanely expensive to do on your own.

Rather than spend resources on huge data centres in each country, it instead relies on Amazon to do so.

This is basic unix philosophy – do one thing well.