Netflix streaming has been growing tremendously, now reaching more than 40M subscribers in over 40 countries. These subscribers are enjoying Netflix on more than 1,000 different device types, ranging from game consoles to set-top boxes, TVs and mobile devices. This is all made possible by a complex service-oriented architecture that handles billions of requests a day from those devices. At the center of that architecture is the Netflix API, which is the front door to the entire system.
This presentation will describe how the Netflix API evolved from a typical one-size-fits-all RESTful API designed to support public developers into a web service platform optimized to handle the diversity and variability of each device and user experience. The presentation will also address the challenges involving operations, deployment, performance, fault-tolerance, and rate of innovation at massive scale.
Presented at QCon SF 2013: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/netflix-api-evolution