Netflix's New Peering Appliance Uses FreeBSD

[Scott Long]

On Jun 5, 2012, at 6:16 PM, Scott Long wrote:
> 
> Yes, we are indeed using FreeBSD at Netflix!  For those who are interested, I
> recently moved from Yahoo to Netflix to help support FreeBSD for them, and
> I'm definitely impressed with what is going on there.  Other than a few small
> changes, we're using stock FreeBSD 9, tracking the 9-stable branch on a
> regular basis.  Our chassis is a semi-custom 4U 19" form factor with thirty six
> 3TB SATA disks and 2 SSDs.  Each disk has its own UFS+J filesystem, except for
> the SSDs that are mirrored together with gmirror.  The SSDs hold the OS image
> and cache some of the busiest content.  The other disks hold nothing but the
> audio and video files for our content streams.  We connect to the outside world
> via a twin-port Intel 10GBe optical NIC (only one port is active at the moment),
> and we use LSI MPT2 controllers for 32 of the 36 disks.  The other 4 disks
> connect to the onboard AHCI SATA controller.  All of the disks are
> direct-attach with no SAS backplanes or expanders.  Out-of-band management
> happens via IPMI on an on-board 1Gb NIC.  The entire system consumes
> around 500W of power, making it a very efficient appliance for its functionality.
> 
> Netflix is also at the front of the internet pack with IPv6 roll-out, and FreeBSD
> plays an essential part of that.  We've been working hard on stabilizing the
> FreeBSD IPv6 stack for production-level traffic, and I recommend that all users
> of IPv6 update to the latest patches in 9-stable and 8-stable.  Contact me
> directly if you have questions about this.  That said, we're excited about World
> IPv6 Day, and we're ready with AAAA DNS records and content service from both
> Amazon and the traditional CDNs as well as our OpenConnect network.
> 
>> From an advocacy standpoint, Netflix represents 30% of all North American
> internet traffic during peak hours, and FreeBSD is becoming an integral part
> of that metric as we shift traffic off of the traditional CDNs.  We're expanding
> quickly, which means that FreeBSD is once again a core part of the internet
> infrastructure.  As we find and fix stability and performance issues, we're
> aggressively pushing those changes into FreeBSD so that everyone can
> benefit from them, just as we benefit from the contributions of the rest of the
> FreeBSD ecosystem.  We're proud to be a part of the community, and look
> forward to a long-term relationship with FreeBSD.
> 
> If you have any questions, let me know or follow the information links on the
> OpenConnect web site.
> 

I wanted to follow up on this briefly.  I jumped the gun a little bit in talking about this publicly, since the Openconnect website wasn't fully  globally online at the time.  It is now, so anyone who previously had trouble getting to it should try again at https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect.  Also, I mistakenly claimed that our regular CDN partners were serving streaming content over IPv6.  This isn't the case, only OpenConnect is, and I apologize for any confusion (hey, I've only just started at Netflix, and I couldn't even spell IPv6 two weeks ago =-)  Finally, I wanted to thank the NginX developers, they've done an amazing job supporting us.

The community enthusiasm and interest has been outstanding so far, so please feel free to continue to ask questions on the mailing list and to make formal inquires to Netflix.

Thanks,
Scott