Katharina Probst is an Engineering Manager at Netflix, where she leads the API team and helps bring Netflix streaming to millions of people around the world. Prior to joining Netflix, she was in the cloud computing team at Google, where she saw cloud computing from the provider side. Her interests include scalable, distributed systems, APIs, cloud computing, and building effective and successful teams. She also holds a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
The Netflix API is one of the most critical services in the Netflix ecosystem of services: requests for signups, profile changes, search, recommendations, playback, and more go through the API. For the past few years, we have enabled an architecture that allows device teams to write server-side scripts that is hosted on the API servers. As the complexity of our product as well as the number and complexity of the server-side scripts are continuously increasing, we are undertaking a major re-architecture of the system. The new system will continue to enable server-side scripting by device teams, but their scripts will now run and scale independently, while running on our container infrastructure. With its heavy emphasis on the developer experience, this will effective create a Platform-as-a-Service for such scripts.
In this talk, I will cover the motivations for the new architecture and provide details of our approach.
