Is It Worth Following Netflix And Running Your Entire Business On The Public Cloud?

Online video on demand streaming service Netflix will complete its long journey to the public cloud this summer when it shuts down its final in-house datacenter.

When the datacenter closes, the hugely popular video on demand portal will rely entirely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure.

But just how feasible is it for other businesses to follow suit and move wholesale to the public cloud, and does such a step make sense for most firms?

Any company thinking of following Netflix should consider that the company is something of an anomaly.

“Netflix is not like any other company. They are what I would call typically a single application company, so they have one application which needs to scale enormously,” said Gregor Petri, research VP and cloud computing specialist at analyst house Gartner.

“It’s an application that at some points of the day has hardly any users and at others has many, many millions of users.”

Helping Netflix to cope with that demand are applications that have been designed to run in the public cloud, meaning they are tailored to scale with demand and be resilient to failure.

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