Netflix has more than 220 million active members who perform a variety of actions throughout each session, ranging from renaming a profile to watching a title. Reacting to these actions in near real-time to keep the experience consistent across devices is critical for ensuring an optimal member experience. By Ankush Gulati, David Gevorkyan.
This is not an easy task, considering the wide variety of supported devices and the sheer volume of actions our members perform. To this end, we developed a Rapid Event Notification System (RENO) to support use cases that require server initiated communication with devices in a scalable and extensible manner.
The main content is split into:
- Motivation
- Use cases
- Design decisions
- Single events source
- Event prioritization
- Hybrid communication model
- Targeted delivery
- Managing high RPS
Using a Push-and-Pull delivery model combination also supports devices limited to a single communication model. This includes older, legacy devices that do not support Push Notifications.
With over 220 million members, we were conscious of the fact that a service like RENO needs to process many events per member during a viewing session. At peak times, RENO serves about 150k events per second. Such a high RPS during specific times of the day can create a thundering herd problem and put strain on internal and external downstream services. Excellent read!
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