SDC2021: Netflix Drive for Media Assets

Netflix Studios produces petabytes of media content accounting for billions of media assets. These assets are managed, created, edited, encoded, and rendered by artists working on a multitude of workstation environments that run on cloud, from different parts of the globe. Artists working on a project may only need access to a subset of the assets from a large corpus. Artists may also want to work on their personal workspaces on intermediate content, and would like to keep only the final copy of their work persisted on cloud. Ever wondered about the architecture that works for this scale and provides artists with a secure, performant and seamless storage interface? In this talk, we present Netflix Drive, a Cloud Drive for Studio Media applications and a generic paved path solution for storing and retrieving all assets in Netflix. Netflix Drive ties together disparate data and metadata stores in a cogent form for creating and serving assets. Talk Structure: In this talk, we will share with the audience how Netflix Drive is an extensible, scalable, performant, hybrid architecture for managing Studio and Media assets. We explore how Media pipelines leverage the dynamic namespace design provided by Netflix Drive to expose pertinent assets to artists. We also highlight different instance types of Netflix Drive that open up several integrations with tools and workstations used by Studio artists. Key Takeaways: As studio applications generate and consume assets, there is a need to design scalable architectures that work in cloud and on-premise, provide a globally consistent view of data, and integrate seamlessly with artist workflows. In this talk, attendees would learn about an extremely performant and scalable file system built using FUSE to provide an intuitive interface to artists, and how multiple data & metadata stores, which can be on-premise or in cloud, can be plugged into Netflix Drive’s ecosystem. Attendees will also learn how different instances of Netflix Drive can be used by different studio applications and workflows to store and retrieve pertinent content.

Learning Objectives
Learning about building a FUSE based file system for studio applications
Leverage dynamic namespace design to enable workflows for studio artists' content creation
Learn how object stores in cloud can be used for storing media assets
Building multi-tiered storage architectures for Netflix Studios in Cloud

Presented by
Vikram Krishnamurthy
Netflix

Kishore Kasi
Netflix
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