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title: 1.4 Netflix Case Study
tags: [agile, agile intro]

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###### tags: `agile` `agile intro`
# 1.4 Netflix Case Study

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# Welcome 
The Netflix Case Study is an example of how speed, innovation, and leadership all drove a new form of controlling success at scale.

Netflix was smart enough to know that there was no guarantee in the new world of online streaming video when it came to infrastructure or applications. The needs were changing fast and the demand was growing faster.

As a result, Netflix underwent a dramatic transformation to become a new beacon for the Cloud-Based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company. 

The following case study dives into their transformation to become truly democratized and Agile in their approach to engineering software at scale.

Even today, most companies are still striving to achieve what Netflix accomplished almost have a decade ago.


Netflix wins by being agile at scale.
Netflix was not always a video streaming company.


# Keynote: Velocity and Volume (or Speed Wins) by Adrian Cockcroft

Chief architect Adrian Cockcroft talks about the challenges of moving from a company that delivers DVD's in the mail to one that was delivering movies as a service online.

He talked about trade-offs between a volume-based approach
or a velocity approach, concluding: speed wins.

![](https://i.imgur.com/CItGeTE.jpg)

- [ ] Watch and transcribe? 
{%youtube wyWI3gLpB8o %}
Slides: http://flowcon.org/dl/flowcon-sanfran-2013/slides/AdrianCockcroft_VelocityAndVolumeorSpeedWins.pdf

in order to achieve this new foundational paradigm.
he identified four critical items
that must be applied within the Netflix culture

## 1.  Cultural of Innovation
This is the idea that as opportunities evolve,
as new platforms were developed,
that Netflix should be able to take advantage of them
to be able to jump into those opportunities
to stay competitive.
## 2.  Data Analytics
This is the idea that you need to be able to,
not just observe and orient, but to be able to understand
what's going on within your system
and then be able to make choices
based on real data as a test driven approach.
## 3.  Decentralized Decisions
The system that they were developing was too complicated,
and you needed to be able to very quickly assign resources
to the parts of the system as needed.
With that quick realignment of resources,
Netflix could be come very scalable
and meet the demands of a very rapidly growing user base.
## 4. Responsibility and Freedom
You are free to take action, you are free to make changes
but in the end as a coder, if you built something
and it had a bug, they were gonna wake you up
at two in the morning and have you fix it.

So this idea of an agile self-service mechanism
for deploying new code changes was critical.

You can learn about this and all the approaches
that they implemented, which were years ahead
of their time, because we're still today
in many organizations, trying to get to
what the Netflix paradigm achieved almost five years ago.

















