Netflix Technology Blog
The Netflix TechBlog: long form write ups from the engineers behind the streaming service on data platforms, Cassandra, Flink, batch compute, personalisation, device analytics, in house LLM serving and resilience. Decisions are usually explained with the constraints, numbers and lessons included. For backend, data and ML engineers who want detailed case studies at global scale.
Guide
System Design
Netflix
Advanced
Free
What it covers
Netflix has published its TechBlog on Medium for many years, and it remains one of the most read company engineering blogs. 2026 posts include:
- In house LLM serving at Netflix: running model deployment and inference inside the existing production environment.
- MAPS, multimodal asset personalisation at scale: using multimodal embeddings to personalise artwork and assets closer to a title's launch.
- How Netflix simplified batch compute with Kueue: replacing custom scheduling logic with an open source Kubernetes job queue.
- The evolution of Cassandra data movement at Netflix: a layered architecture built on Apache Cassandra Analytics.
- A tale of two Flink autoscalers: moving from an in house autoscaler to an open source one, and the hidden cost of maintaining your own.
- How and why Netflix built a real time distributed graph, a multi part series.
- Modelling device capabilities for analytics.
The archive also contains classics on chaos engineering (Chaos Monkey), the Zuul gateway, Hystrix, microservices migration and video encoding.
Why it is worth reading
- Decisions with context. Posts explain why a choice was made, often with numbers and mistakes included.
- Build versus buy honesty. Several recent posts describe replacing home built systems with open source ones, which is a useful counterweight to the idea that big companies build everything.
- Breadth. Data engineering, ML, infrastructure, security, video encoding and client engineering are all represented.
How to read engineering blogs like this one
- Start from a problem you have, not the newest post. Search the blog for the thing you are stuck on (for example "autoscaling" or "Cassandra") and read that.
- Redraw the architecture after reading. The parts you cannot redraw are the parts you did not understand.
- Note the constraints. Netflix scale changes the answer. Ask what you would do at one hundredth of the traffic.
Prerequisites
Posts assume vocabulary: consistent hashing, backpressure, quorum, stream processing, embeddings. If those terms slow you down, learn the fundamentals first with a system design primer or Designing Data-Intensive Applications. Otherwise you will read the words without getting the lessons.
Weak spots
- Scale can mislead. Copying Netflix patterns into a small startup is a classic mistake. The posts are for understanding, not templates.
- Some posts are team introductions or hiring pieces with little technical content.
- Hosted on Medium, which occasionally shows sign in prompts, though posts remain free to read.
Pair it with
- The Hotstar tech blog for live streaming spikes in a South Asian market.
- Uber and Meta engineering blogs for other large scale infrastructure stories.
Best for: engineers who know the fundamentals and want real, detailed case studies from one of the most influential engineering organisations.
Ready to start?
Opens on Netflix in a new tab.
Stuck on something specific?
Writing only gets you so far. If you want an answer to your situation rather than the general case, book a session and we will work through it together. Sessions are free for approved Sefism members, and a few slots open each week.
Follow along
New writing, resources and project ideas land here first.