15 March 2016 – My team and I got back from the Mobile World Congress just two weeks ago and this weekend we head to Rome (where my video team is based) to finish writing posts/editing 100 hours of video. I am going to throw onto this site a few bits and bobs “in progress” from MWC that won’t go onto the main EAM Capital website just yet which will give you a feel for the diversity of topics I covered.
It’s easy to get distracted at MWC what with 99,000+ attendees (official count, up from 93,000 last year). It has long been an essential date in the mobile industry calendar given the potential client/customer base. With the highest number of CxOs at any technology event. This is all spread out across 260,000 square meters … roughly a 15-20 minute walk from the North end to the South end of the exhibit hall area … but the folks from the GSM Association (GSMA) … the organizers of MWC … make it so easy to navigate. If you are in any part of technology space, this is heaven.
One of the companies I spent time with was Netflix (we are going to partner on a few things). Earlier this year Netflix announced it was going live in 130 new countries. The list includes massive new audiences like Russia, India, and South Korea. It’s a huge expansion of the company’s footprint, with China the notable exception to major markets where you can now stream its content. It in effect tripled its the company’s distribution. What you have is the birth of a new global internet TV network.
We were all fascinated by the “code” behind all of this and we received lots of briefing notes. Marco Vallini, my video team leader, pulled together a few public notes so here is a brief introduction:
Netflix is known as a place to binge watch television, but behind the scenes, there’s a lot that goes on before everyone’s favorite show can be streamed. The first step to deploying an application or service is building. Netflix created Nebula, a set of plugins for the Gradle build system, that “help with the heavy-lifting around building applications,” said the engineers. Once the code has been built and tested locally using Nebula, the team pushes the updated source code to a Git repository.
Every deployment at Neflix begins with the creation of an Amazon Machine Image, and to generate them from source, Netflix created what it calls “the Bakery.” It exposes an API that facilitates the creation of AMIs globally.
When it comes time to deploy and after the “baking” is complete, teams will use Spinnaker to manage multi-region deployments, canary releases, and red/black deployments. Netflix is continuing to look at the developer experience and determine how it can improve.