Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2012 00:16:46 +0000 From: Scott Long <scottl@netflix.com> To: Benjamin Francom <bfrancom@gmail.com> Cc: "freebsd-stable@freebsd.org" <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Netflix's New Peering Appliance Uses FreeBSD Message-ID: <3CEF3B39-BE1E-4FC4-81F3-D26049C83313@netflix.com> In-Reply-To: <CAMYW4Zi4y16EL1=%2Bsfz1XATc9ZnQpocUD_Xf9Jg=LR=c1AgaKA@mail.gmail.com> References: <CAMYW4Zi4y16EL1=%2Bsfz1XATc9ZnQpocUD_Xf9Jg=LR=c1AgaKA@mail.gmail.com>
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On Jun 5, 2012, at 9:56 AM, Benjamin Francom wrote: > I just saw this, and thought I'd share: >=20 > Open Connect Appliance Software >=20 > Netflix delivers streaming content using a combination of intelligent > clients, a central control system, and a network of Open Connect applianc= es. >=20 > When designing the Open Connect Appliance Software, we focused on these > fundamental design goals: >=20 > - Use of Open Source software > - Ability to efficiently read from disk and write to network sockets > - High-performance HTTP delivery > - Ability to gather routing information via BGP >=20 > Operating System >=20 > For the operating system, we use FreeBSD <http://www.freebsd.org/>; versio= n > 9.0. This was selected for its balance of stability and features, a stron= g > development community and staff expertise. We will contribute changes we > make as part of our project to the community through the FreeBSD committe= rs > on our team. > Web server >=20 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 sma= ll 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 ima= ge and cache some of the busiest content. The other disks hold nothing but th= e audio and video files for our content streams. We connect to the outside w= orld via a twin-port Intel 10GBe optical NIC (only one port is active at the mom= ent), 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 function= ality. Netflix is also at the front of the internet pack with IPv6 roll-out, and F= reeBSD plays an essential part of that. We've been working hard on stabilizing th= e FreeBSD IPv6 stack for production-level traffic, and I recommend that all u= sers 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 bo= th 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 par= t of that metric as we shift traffic off of the traditional CDNs. We're expa= nding 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 t= he OpenConnect web site. Scott
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