As of 2020, cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) continued to be the most profitable part of the business of US-based technology company Amazon.com, Inc. (Amazon)s . According to a marketing analytics company called Intricately, US-based Internet streaming company Netflix Inc. (Netflix), the key rival of Amazon Prime, was the top AWS user, based on an aspect of AWS Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) monthly spend. According to Amazon, Netflix used more than 100,000 server instances on AWS for nearly all its computing and storage needs. That included databases, analytics, recommendation engines, and video transcoding.

Launched in July 2002, AWS was a subsidiary of Amazon that offered cloud computing services. These services were operated from massive data centers located around the world. Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, companies can access technology services such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like AWS.

The benefit of using cloud computing services was that firms could avoid the upfront costs and difficulties of owning and maintaining their own IT infrastructure, and pay instead for just what they used and when they used it. The growing demand for cloud services indicated that companies were letting go of their own data centers and moving their application workloads to the cloud. Customers used AWS to lower costs, become more agile toward research, and innovate faster. ..

Netflix was founded in 1997 by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings, and was headquartered in Los Gatos, California. In 1999, Netflix introduced a Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) subscription service, providing unlimited rentals of movies on a monthly subscription basis. Toward the close of 2007, Netflix was shipping around 1.6 million DVDs on a daily basis.

Prior to 2008, Netflix was dependent on its own data centers that ran on relational databases for the delivery of its services. Being a fast growing streaming service, it carried thousands of videos. It also stored customer information and data regarding their viewing behavior in its database. In August 2008, Netflix experienced a major database disruption as result of a data center failure, due to which it was unable to ship DVDs to its members for three days. That forced the company to rethink about operating its own data centers.

However, there were certain challenges Netflix faced in moving to AWS. It was important that while making the migration to the cloud, users should not experience any downtime in streaming. Also, it was necessary that the new architecture in AWS should be scaled in line with the rapidly growing member base of Netflix and that billing migration needed to occur without impacting the existing customer billing information.

Netflix replaced its previous Oracle database with Apache Cassandra, an open source NoSQL database known for its scalability and enterprise-grade reliability. NoSQL database systems were distributed non-relational databases that also used non-SQL language and mechanisms in working with data. In NoSQL databases, the workload could be automatically spread across multiple servers, was highly distributable with clusters of servers which could hold the database, and was easily scalable to adapt to the complexity of the cloud.

AWS prepared the total groundwork needed to deliver the content through Netflix such as customer sign up or video search, as Netflixs datacenter infrastructure was placed entirely on AWS hardware. That included the business logic, personalization, search, and data processing which provided the streaming experience. Most of the technology needed to manage employees of the streaming business was also on AWS.

Netflix saw a tremendous increase in streaming hours from 2008 onward. By 2015, it had eight times as many streaming members as it had in 2008. Industry observers thought that the stringent demands made by Netflix, in addition to Amazons willingness to improve its service and meet its customers requirements, played a major role in making AWS into the full, enterprise-scale integrated set of services that it was, as of 2019.

Answer the following questions, weight 25 points each

1. Netflix faced a problem in moving to AWS. Which of the four reasons to outsource would solve this problem. Explain briefly.

2. Having a smart outsourcing strategy is essential to emphasize on the achievement, how does Netflix outsourcing strategy ensure the achievement of Netflix objectives?

3. Which of the nine areas of Project Management were mentioned in the case. How would you do things differently if you were a project manager to prevent what happened?

4. As a manager, how much would you think applying IT governance would leverage Netflix technology and create an added value service?