Netflix migrating more infrastructure to Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services on Friday announced a big reference customer---Netflix.

According to Amazon, Netflix, which has been using the e-commerce giant's Web services for a year, will expand its usage and migrate more of its infrastructure to the cloud.

For Amazon Web Services, Netflix represents a strong case study to take to other enterprises. Corporate IT buyers often prefer someone else to make the leap to a new platform and then follow. Netflix is high profile enough to garner interest since it requires high availability and is using Amazon's cloud for core business functions.

In a nutshell, Netflix's movie lists, search, movie transcoding and recommendation system will be powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). By offloading infrastructure to AWS, Netflix's tech team will focus more on the user experience. Netflix is also migrating movie and member data crunching to AWS.

Netflix today uses Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) to deliver its movie subscription service to new platforms like the Wii, PlayStation and iPad. In addition, Netflix is using Amazon Elastic Map Reduce to analyze streaming sessions and metrics.