Netflix guts data center in shift to cloud

Computerworld - The idea that public cloud-based services will radically transform in-house IT operations is ever more evident at Netflix.

Netflix no longer wants to run a data center in support of its in-house corporate IT services. It is shifting internal applications to Amazon's cloud, as well as using software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers for business services.

Mike Kail, vice president of IT operations at Netflix, said he wants to move as much as 95% of Netflix's corporate IT services, now run in an in-house data center, to the cloud, but the goal is 100%, he said.

These corporate IT operations are separate from the Netflix streaming service, which operates from Amazon's cloud.

The intent is to focus IT operations on providing services to the business, and not managing hardware, said Kail. "Part of my charter is to reduce my data center footprint as much as possible," he said.

If Kail doesn't eliminate the need for a data center all together, at worst he estimates that he may be left with two racks running about 50 virtual servers -- something small enough to fit in a closet, and not the corporate IT data center he now runs with about 2,500 virtual servers.

Kail, who has been with Netflix for a year-and-half, has been working for the last year to move to a cloud-based infrastructure, a project he hopes to complete in a year to 18 months. To accomplish that, Netflix has been turning to SaaS vendors such as Workday, storage provider Box and now Sumo Logic, as well as rolling out its own Amazon instances of its internal IT applications.

Netflix's IT direction is particularly good news for Sumo Logic, a log management and analytics start-up, which is using Amazon's cloud. This two year old company announced Tuesday that Netflix is a customer.

Kail says this decision to migrate services to the cloud is about concentrating on what's important to the business, and by using public cloud services and SaaS providers he will no longer have to worry about hardware refreshes, operating system patches and paying for power and space. "[These are] time consuming tasks that don't really add value," he said.

"I worry about processing and analyzing the data and providing great services versus all the other extra-curricular activities," said Kail, referring to hardware and data center maintenance matters.

Cloud-based infrastructure services such as Amazon's have given a lift to a variety of start-ups. Sumo Logic, which has 60 employees and is based in Mountain View, Calif., launched its services early this year, and says it benefits from Amazon's ability to rapidly scale up with demand.