Netflix, Cloud, and Search
May 9, 2010
I read “Netflix’s Movie Cloud Is Moving into the Amazon Cloud” and learned a couple of things and was unable to find one item of information I sought. The news, of course, that Amazon will host a competitor’s business. Not too surprising in these days when AOL hires a Google manager and a Microsoft person to be chief technology officer and when Google is imitating Bing’s user interface.
The two things I learned in the article were:
- The move apparently was a result of open information sharing. That’s a positive. But I wonder if those confidentiality agreements that Booz, Allen & Hamilton made grunts like me sign have gone the way of the dodo.
- The Amazon-Netflix system works.
What I wanted to find out was the answer to this question, “Has the search function been moved to the Amazon cloud as well?” If so, how does that work. I heard that Netflix used open source search technology. A cloud based open source search implementation is very big news. I will keep hunting and stay on the tips of my webbed feet when colleagues ask questions.
Stephen E Arnold, May 9, 2010
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One Response to “Netflix, Cloud, and Search”
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Netflix uses the open source Lucene/Solr search engine (in the datacenter and in the Amazon cloud) for web site searches for titles and actors. This is a fairly common approach, not big news at all. You may also be interested in the cloud hosted open data catalog interface described at http://developer.netflix.com/docs/oData_Catalog – however this was jointly developed with Microsoft, so the OData catalog is actually hosted on Azure.
I’m working on a Netflix OData based iPad app which will be open sourced soon…