Case Study: Netflix achieves real-time, terabyte-scale network monitoring and faster analytics with Amazon Web Services (Amazon Kinesis Streams)

Netflix - Customer Case Study

Netflix, the global streaming service with over 100 million members, faced a challenge monitoring and optimizing a highly dynamic, large-scale network where IP addresses frequently change and raw VPC flow logs alone offered little application-level context. To maintain high availability, reduce costs, and improve customer experience, Netflix needed a way to ingest, enrich, and analyze multiple terabytes of flow data per day in near real time to understand cross-region communication and quickly detect outages or inefficiencies.

Netflix built Dredge on Amazon Kinesis Streams to centralize VPC flow logs, join them with application metadata as they stream, and index the enriched data into the Druid analytics engine without an intermediate database. The solution processes billions of events each day—typically using ~1,000 Kinesis shards—delivering analytics in seconds, enabling rapid issue detection, smarter app placement, and ongoing cost and resiliency improvements.

Netflix

John Bennett

Senior Software Engineer