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by "McKinsey Leading Off" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 04:28 - 1 Jul 2024 -
How are global consumers thinking about their health and wellness?
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Growing interest in wellness. Consumers across the globe are increasingly prioritizing and investing in wellness, McKinsey partner Anna Pione shares on a recent episode of The McKinsey Podcast. A McKinsey survey of 5,000 consumers finds that 82% of US consumers, 73% of UK consumers, and 87% of Chinese consumers report wellness as being a top or very important priority in their lives. What’s striking is that the focus keeps increasing, Pione adds.
—Edited by Belinda Yu, editor, Atlanta
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by "Only McKinsey" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 01:31 - 1 Jul 2024 -
The ups and downs of global productivity
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The ups and downs of global productivity
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by "McKinsey & Company" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 12:46 - 1 Jul 2024 -
Top 10 articles this quarter
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Top Ten Newsletter | Second Quarter 2024
Our top ten articles this quarter look at generative AI, bad bosses, inflation, and more. At No. 1 is “What is generative AI?”, which draws on insights from articles by McKinsey’s Rodney W. Zemmel, Kate Smaje, Lareina Yee, Michael Chui, Ida Kristensen, and more.
1. What is generative AI?
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) describes algorithms (such as ChatGPT) that can be used to create new content, including audio, code, images, text, simulations, and videos. Recent breakthroughs in the field have the potential to drastically change the way we approach content creation. Take a comprehensive view
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by "McKinsey Top Ten" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 06:57 - 30 Jun 2024 -
The week in charts
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by "McKinsey Week in Charts" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 03:50 - 29 Jun 2024 -
EP118: What are the differences among database locks?
EP118: What are the differences among database locks?
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for moreThis week’s system design refresher:
What are the differences among database locks?
How do we Perform Pagination in API Design?
What distinguishes MVC, MVP, MVVM, MVVM-C, and VIPER architecture patterns from each other?
What happens when you type a URL into your browser?
How do you pay from your digital wallet, such as Paypal, Venmo, Paytm, by scanning the QR code?
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What are the differences among database locks?
In database management, locks are mechanisms that prevent concurrent access to data to ensure data integrity and consistency.
Here are the common types of locks used in databases:
Shared Lock (S Lock)
It allows multiple transactions to read a resource simultaneously but not modify it. Other transactions can also acquire a shared lock on the same resource.Exclusive Lock (X Lock)
It allows a transaction to both read and modify a resource. No other transaction can acquire any type of lock on the same resource while an exclusive lock is held.Update Lock (U Lock)
It is used to prevent a deadlock scenario when a transaction intends to update a resource.Schema Lock
It is used to protect the structure of database objects.Bulk Update Lock (BU Lock)
It is used during bulk insert operations to improve performance by reducing the number of locks required.Key-Range Lock
It is used in indexed data to prevent phantom reads (inserting new rows into a range that a transaction has already read).Row-Level Lock
It locks a specific row in a table, allowing other rows to be accessed concurrently.Page-Level Lock
It locks a specific page (a fixed-size block of data) in the database.Table-Level Lock
It locks an entire table. This is simple to implement but can reduce concurrency significantly.
How do we Perform Pagination in API Design?
Pagination is crucial in API design to handle large datasets efficiently and improve performance. Here are six popular pagination techniques:
Offset-based Pagination:
This technique uses an offset and a limit parameter to define the starting point and the number of records to return.
- Example: GET /orders?offset=0&limit=3
- Pros: Simple to implement and understand.
- Cons: Can become inefficient for large offsets, as it requires scanning and skipping rows.Cursor-based Pagination:
This technique uses a cursor (a unique identifier) to mark the position in the dataset. Typically, the cursor is an encoded string that points to a specific record.Example: GET /orders?cursor=xxx
- Pros: More efficient for large datasets, as it doesn't require scanning skipped records.
- Cons: Slightly more complex to implement and understand.
Page-based Pagination:
This technique specifies the page number and the size of each page.Example: GET /items?page=2&size=3
- Pros: Easy to implement and use.
- Cons: Similar performance issues as offset-based pagination for large page numbers.
Keyset-based Pagination:
This technique uses a key to filter the dataset, often the primary key or another indexed column.Example: GET /items?after_id=102&limit=3
- Pros: Efficient for large datasets and avoids performance issues with large offsets.
- Cons: Requires a unique and indexed key, and can be complex to implement.
Time-based Pagination:
This technique uses a timestamp or date to paginate through records.Example: GET /items?start_time=xxx&end_time=yyy
- Pros: Useful for datasets ordered by time, ensures no records are missed if new ones are added.
- Cons: Requires a reliable and consistent timestamp.
Hybrid Pagination:
This technique combines multiple pagination techniques to leverage their strengths.
Example: Combining cursor and time-based pagination for efficient scrolling through time-ordered records.Example: GET /items?cursor=abc&start_time=xxx&end_time=yyy
- Pros: Can offer the best performance and flexibility for complex datasets.
- Cons: More complex to implement and requires careful design.
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What distinguishes MVC, MVP, MVVM, MVVM-C, and VIPER architecture patterns from each other?
These architecture patterns are among the most commonly used in app development, whether on iOS or Android platforms. Developers have introduced them to overcome the limitations of earlier patterns. So, how do they differ?
MVC, the oldest pattern, dates back almost 50 years
Every pattern has a "view" (V) responsible for displaying content and receiving user input
Most patterns include a "model" (M) to manage business data
"Controller," "presenter," and "view-model" are translators that mediate between the view and the model ("entity" in the VIPER pattern)
These translators can be quite complex to write, so various patterns have been proposed to make them more maintainable
What happens when you type a URL into your browser?
The diagram below illustrates the steps.
Bob enters a URL into the browser and hits Enter. In this example, the URL is composed of 4 parts:
🔹 scheme - 𝒉𝒕𝒕𝒑://. This tells the browser to send a connection to the server using HTTP.
🔹 domain - 𝒆𝒙𝒂𝒎𝒑𝒍𝒆.𝒄𝒐𝒎. This is the domain name of the site.
🔹 path - 𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒅𝒖𝒄𝒕/𝒆𝒍𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒓𝒊𝒄. It is the path on the server to the requested resource: phone.
🔹 resource - 𝒑𝒉𝒐𝒏𝒆. It is the name of the resource Bob wants to visit.The browser looks up the IP address for the domain with a domain name system (DNS) lookup. To make the lookup process fast, data is cached at different layers: browser cache, OS cache, local network cache, and ISP cache.
2.1 If the IP address cannot be found at any of the caches, the browser goes to DNS servers to do a recursive DNS lookup until the IP address is found (this will be covered in another post).Now that we have the IP address of the server, the browser establishes a TCP connection with the server.
The browser sends an HTTP request to the server. The request looks like this:
𝘎𝘌𝘛 /𝘱𝘩𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘏𝘛𝘛𝘗/1.1
𝘏𝘰𝘴𝘵: 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘦.𝘤𝘰𝘮The server processes the request and sends back the response. For a successful response (the status code is 200). The HTML response might look like this:
𝘏𝘛𝘛𝘗/1.1 200 𝘖𝘒
𝘋𝘢𝘵𝘦: 𝘚𝘶𝘯, 30 𝘑𝘢𝘯 2022 00:01:01 𝘎𝘔𝘛
𝘚𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘦𝘳: 𝘈𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘦
𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵-𝘛𝘺𝘱𝘦: 𝘵𝘦𝘹𝘵/𝘩𝘵𝘮𝘭; 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘴𝘦𝘵=𝘶𝘵𝘧-8
<!𝘋𝘖𝘊𝘛𝘠𝘗𝘌 𝘩𝘵𝘮𝘭>
<𝘩𝘵𝘮𝘭 𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘨="𝘦𝘯">
𝘏𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘰 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥
</𝘩𝘵𝘮𝘭>The browser renders the HTML content.
How do you pay from your digital wallet, such as Paypal, Venmo, Paytm, by scanning the QR code?
To understand the process involved, we need to divide the “scan to pay” process into two sub-processes:
Merchant generates a QR code and displays it on the screen
Consumer scans the QR code and pays
Here are the steps for generating the QR code:
When you want to pay for your shopping, the cashier tallies up all the goods and calculates the total amount due, for example, $123.45. The checkout has an order ID of SN129803. The cashier clicks the “checkout” button.
The cashier’s computer sends the order ID and the amount to PSP.
The PSP saves this information to the database and generates a QR code URL.
PSP’s Payment Gateway service reads the QR code URL.
The payment gateway returns the QR code URL to the merchant’s computer.
The merchant’s computer sends the QR code URL (or image) to the checkout counter.
The checkout counter displays the QR code.
These 7 steps complete in less than a second. Now it’s the consumer’s turn to pay from their digital wallet by scanning the QR code:
The consumer opens their digital wallet app to scan the QR code.
After confirming the amount is correct, the client clicks the “pay” button.
The digital wallet App notifies the PSP that the consumer has paid the given QR code.
The PSP payment gateway marks this QR code as paid and returns a success message to the consumer’s digital wallet App.
The PSP payment gateway notifies the merchant that the consumer has paid the given QR code.
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by "ByteByteGo" <bytebytego@substack.com> - 11:36 - 29 Jun 2024 -
Take an unbiased approach to decision making
Readers & Leaders
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THIS MONTH’S PAGE-TURNERS ON BUSINESS AND BEYOND
You have a hunch that your store’s fourth-quarter sales are down because of online shopping. You complete an analysis of shoppers who purchased online more often this quarter than last. The solution is simple: You need an online store, right? Wrong. You may have just solved a problem that didn’t exist; something else could be amiss. All too often, many engage in confirmation bias—making assumptions based on preexisting beliefs. Bias could affect important business and personal decisions. It could also lead to costly mistakes and missed opportunities. To gain a more balanced perspective, take a few steps back. Start with an empty canvas, or even better, that blank first page of a book.
This edition of Readers & Leaders sheds light on the foibles of decision making. Rockefeller International chairman Ruchir Sharma discusses why government’s predetermined solution to economic disaster won’t avert a crisis but contributes to one. Elspeth Kirman, Nesta’s chief program officer, highlights the impact of bias on constructive decision making and explains why the worst form of bias is inactivity. American University professor Aram Sinnreich shares why solely exploring data that support an argument rather than letting data drive discovery could be a recipe for failure. Read on to see how a more neutral viewpoint could help avert bias and improve outcomes.
Want early access to interviews? Download the McKinsey Insights app to read the latest Author Talks now.it bears repeating
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
TURN BACK THE PAGE
Put your bias-busting skills to the test as you explore these interviews:
1. Think you’re foolproof? It could be hurting your decision making
2. How to remove unconscious bias from the workplace
3. Dismantling double standards in business with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin
4. Howard Friedman on getting the most from your data science teamBUSINESS BESTSELLERS TOP
8
Catch up on the latest and greatest reads for the month. Explore May’s business bestsellers, prepared exclusively for McKinsey by Circana. Check out the full selection on McKinsey on Books.
BUSINESS OVERALL
BUSINESS HARDCOVER
ECONOMICS
DECISION MAKING
ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
WORKPLACE CULTURE
COMPUTERS & AI
SUSTAINABILITY
Venture Meets Mission: Aligning People, Purpose, and Profit to Innovate and Transform Society by Arun Gupta, Gerard George, and Thomas J. Fewer (Stanford University Press)
BOOKMARK THIS
The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out
The Journey of Leadership (Portfolio/Penguin Group), McKinsey’s next major book, will publish in the United States and the United Kingdom on September 10. The book, by senior partners Dana Maor, Kurt Strovink, Ramesh Srinivasan, and senior partner emeritus Hans-Werner Kaas, is the first-ever explanation of McKinsey’s step-by-step approach to transforming leaders both professionally and personally—including revealing lessons from its legendary CEO leadership program, the “Bower Forum,” which has counseled more than 500 global CEOs over the past decade. It’s a journey that helps leaders hone the psychological, emotional, and, ultimately, human attributes that result in success in today’s most demanding top job.
Coming soon
Curious about the books that global leaders are reading? Stay tuned for our annual reading guide, which launches in July. Discover which selections executives have on their shelves and why.
If you’d like to propose a book or author for #McKAuthorTalks, please email us at Author_Talks@McKinsey.com. Due to the high volume of requests, we will respond only to those being considered.
—Edited by Emily Adeyanju, editor, Carolinas
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by "McKinsey Readers & Leaders" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 11:17 - 29 Jun 2024 -
You're invited! Join us for a virtual event on tight labor markets in advanced economies
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New from McKinsey & Company
Labor markets in advanced economies are exceptionally tight today. This tightness isn’t the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic but rather a sustained trend driven by aging workforces and labor demand outstripping supply. Continued tightness comes at an economic cost, increasing the impetus for business leaders and policymakers to come up with new approaches to boost participation and productivity to offset its impact.
Join us on Tuesday, July 30 at 11:00AM-12:00PM EDT (5:00PM-6:00PM CEST) for a discussion on MGI’s latest research that examines labor market conditions in advanced economies, highlighting dynamics across sectors and occupations, future supply trends, and strategies to mitigate labor shortages.
This virtual event will include a presentation by the authors followed by a panel with leading labor market experts who will discuss: •
Countries and sectors that are most impacted by labor shortages
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by "McKinsey & Company" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 03:07 - 28 Jun 2024 -
Think big
The Shortlist
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Curated by Liz Hilton Segel, chief client officer and managing partner, global industry practices, & Homayoun Hatami, managing partner, global client capabilities
How to climb Mount Everest? Two essentials seem to matter most: an experienced guide and a willingness to do the hard work. No one goes from base camp to the summit unassisted. And no one gets there without plans, preparation, and grit. This summer, McKinsey is exploring what it takes for companies to summit their industries. We hope you enjoy the read.
—Liz and Homayoun
Everybody has dreams. Successful companies do something about it. The biggest gap in business is between companies that embrace the challenges of transformation and those that hope “business as usual” will succeed forever.
Get started with What it takes to create a winning transformation, a Five Fifty briefing from McKinsey Quarterly.What do they have that we don’t? Answer: a superpower. Competitive dynamics are complicated, but they often boil down to a simple fact: one company has invested in an institutional capability that helps it do a mission-critical activity superlatively well, and the others have not.
Get your cape on with Building a superpower: What can we learn from the Magnificent Seven?, by Brad Mendelson, Harald Fanderl, and coauthors.People persons. Some CEOs seem to have it all figured out. They have financial acumen and strong management skills. They’re systems thinkers. But their results lag behind their aspirations. What gives? Our new book on leadership suggests an answer: they need to connect authentically with their teams—and themselves.
For a sneak peek, check out this excerpt: The ‘inside out’ leadership journey: How personal growth creates the path to success, by Dana Maor, Hans-Werner Kaas, Kurt Strovink, and Ramesh Srinivasan.Anybody out there? Many big consumer companies have hit a rough patch in the 2020s. Consumers are often hard to pin down, macro trends are slowing growth, and costs are rising. To salvage the next five years, companies will need to both reshape their portfolios and build best-in-class operational capabilities (superpower, anyone?).
Make 2030 a year to remember with Rescuing the decade: A dual agenda for the consumer goods industry, by Jessica Moulton, Pavlos Exarchos, and Warren Teichner.We hope you find these ideas inspiring and helpful. See you next time with four more McKinsey ideas for the CEO and others in the C-suite.
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by "McKinsey CEO Shortlist" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 04:53 - 28 Jun 2024 -
Why should executives lead from the inside out?
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Brought to you by Liz Hilton Segel, chief client officer and managing partner, global industry practices, & Homayoun Hatami, managing partner, global client capabilities
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Human-centric leadership. Many leaders who have all the right skills still struggle to link their aspirations with their organizations’ performance. On a deep level, they aren’t reflecting enough about how to become a more human-centric leader, conclude McKinsey senior partners Dana Maor, Kurt Strovink, and Ramesh Srinivasan and senior partner emeritus Hans-Werner Kaas after careful analysis. They are the authors of The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out (Portfolio, September 2024).
—Edited by Belinda Yu, editor, Atlanta
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by "Only McKinsey" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 01:13 - 28 Jun 2024 -
A Crash Course in Database Sharding
A Crash Course in Database Sharding
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As an application grows in popularity, it attracts more active users and incorporates additional features. This growth leads to a daily increase in data generation, which is a positive indicator from a business perspective.
However, it can also pose challenges to the application's architecture, particularly in terms of database scalability.
The database is a critical component of any application, but it is also one of the most difficult components to scale horizontally. When an application receives increased traffic and data volume, the database can become a performance bottleneck, impacting the user experience.
Sharding is a technique that addresses the challenges of horizontal database scaling. It involves partitioning the database into smaller, more manageable units called shards.
In this post, we’ll cover the fundamentals of database sharding, exploring its various approaches, technical considerations, and real-world case studies showcasing how companies have implemented sharding to scale their databases.
What is Sharding?...
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by "ByteByteGo" <bytebytego@substack.com> - 11:35 - 27 Jun 2024 -
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by "Remote" <hello@remote-comms.com> - 08:38 - 27 Jun 2024 -
What is productivity?
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Brought to you by Liz Hilton Segel, chief client officer and managing partner, global industry practices, & Homayoun Hatami, managing partner, global client capabilities
•
Why productivity matters. Productivity is a measure of output relative to input, and labor productivity is the most common productivity measure. It’s defined as economic output (gross domestic product, or GDP) per hour worked. Labor productivity growth is crucial to increased wages and standards of living, and it helps increase consumers’ purchasing power, explain McKinsey Global Institute chair Sven Smit and other McKinsey experts on productivity.
•
Slowing productivity growth. The past 25 years have been a major success story for global productivity: from 1997 to 2022, median economy productivity jumped roughly sixfold. But despite this meteoric growth in some economies, productivity growth has slowed overall since the 2008 global financial crisis. One reason has been an overall decline in capital investment across multiple sectors since 2008. Explore our McKinsey Explainer, “What is productivity?,” to view three ways business leaders can improve their productivity potential.
—Edited by Belinda Yu, editor, Atlanta
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by "Only McKinsey" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 01:11 - 27 Jun 2024 -
Getting ahead during volatile times calls for bold aspirations
Re:think
FRESH TAKES ON BIG IDEAS
ON STRATEGIC COURAGE
How to go faster and further during times of volatilityMichael Birshan
During times of upheaval, if leaders believe that the forces of creative destruction are getting more destructive, their greatest risk is presiding over slow but inexorable decline. We’re in a time of volatility right now. The power curve of economic profit is getting steeper. Those that succeed are taking more. Those that fall behind are falling harder. The topple rate for longevity in the S&P 500 or FTSE 100 has accelerated, and many of the most valuable companies in the world are teenagers or young adults, rather than baby boomers.
Some macroeconomic uncertainty is resolving. Politically, though, more people than ever before are going to the polls this year. Fundamentally, this is an age of volatility, with new shocks on top of old shocks on top of enduring disruptive trends. A few years ago, so many boards were learning fast about sustainability. Now it’s generative AI. Geopolitically, at one point the new shock was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Now the new shock is the tragedy in the Middle East.
How can organizations move faster and further in this environment? It’s more important now than ever to adopt the notion of strategic courage. Many leaders honed their management intuition in a period that was relatively stable, where change was predictable, and where some value came from riding out trends. And during times of volatility, the easiest thing is to hunker down. But if leaders only derisk and defer making important choices, they can wind up in a middle band and probably end up capping the upside more than the downside.
Now, value comes from managing through shocks. Three things can give leaders a competitive edge in these uncertain times: insights, commitment, and execution.
An insights edge comes from more and better information from more diverse sources. One mistake I sometimes see is when leaders solicit a diversity of superficial perspectives. They ask ten people for their views, get everybody’s first-order view, and conclude that since everybody’s first-order view is basically the same, there is a clear consensus. That’s not good enough. A real insights edge comes from doing the genuine work to look at second-, third-, and fourth-order views.“Three things can give leaders a competitive edge in these uncertain times: insights, commitment, and execution.”
A strong commitment edge is in some ways the most important. Sometimes I see gaps between knowing and doing, where management teams are too cautious. They pledge to dip a toe in the water or take months to come to decisions when they would be far better off committing to a path forward.
Finally, there’s execution, which is always important, of course. But what differentiates companies during times of volatility is the ability to execute fast and turn on a dime when the situation calls for it, and to do so with discipline and rigor. Many organizations are not built for that because they lay tracks to keep trains going in one direction only.
Turning courage into a strategy requires a few key elements. One approach is to focus on growth. Established companies often struggle because they optimize for returns from their core competencies when they should be thinking about building new breakout businesses. Another way is to disrupt organizational inertia and put money where strategy is. We did some research on resource allocation and found that while entire countries and technologies changed dramatically over a 20-year period, capital allocation among business units in most companies didn’t change. Yet during the same period, faster and more aggressive reallocation correlated with higher shareholder returns. Finally, it’s always helpful to go back to the classics and check the ten tests of strategy.
The key to success is the right mindset and the excellence of the CEO. Courage means bold aspirations, energy, and attempts to succeed—whether that’s to move from the middle to the top quintile of performance, or to say, “I’m not going to benchmark my industry; I’m going to reinvent it.” There needs to be a hunger.
Who’s doing this right? Some of the most vibrant owner-operated companies—whether they’re family-owned businesses or tech firms with strong founders—are courageous because they’re able to be bold and think long term. They have a greater commitment edge and they’re able to allocate substantial resources to move further and faster. Other successful leaders are new, ambitious CEOs who refuse to preside over slow decline and strive to be truly exceptional.
Ultimately, fortune favors the bold. Instead of deciding to wait and see, resolving to act and adjust can make all the difference.Share Michael Birshan’s insights
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Michael Birshan is a senior partner in McKinsey’s London office; he co-leads McKinsey’s global Strategy & Corporate Finance Practice.
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How Netflix Manages 238 Million Memberships?
How Netflix Manages 238 Million Memberships?
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Disclaimer: The details in this post have been derived from the articles/presentations made by the Netflix engineering team. All credit for the architectural details goes to the Netflix engineering team. The links to the original articles are present in the references section at the end of the post. We’ve attempted to analyze the details and provide our input about them. If you find any inaccuracies or omissions, please leave a comment, and we will do our best to fix them.
As a subscription-based streaming service, Netflix's primary revenue source is its membership business. With a staggering 238 million members worldwide, managing memberships efficiently is crucial for the company's success and continued growth.
The membership platform at Netflix plays a vital role in handling the entire lifecycle of a user's subscription.
The membership lifecycle consists of various stages and scenarios:
Signup: A user may begin their Netflix journey by signing up for the service, either directly or through partner channels such as T-Mobile and others.
Plan Changes: Existing members can modify their subscription plans according to their preferences and needs.
Renewal: As a subscription service, Netflix automatically attempts to renew a user’s plan using the payment method associated with the account.
Payment Issues: In case of problems with the payment gateway or insufficient funds, a user’s account may be put on hold or granted a grace period to resolve the issue.
Membership Pause or Cancellation: Users have the option to temporarily pause their membership or permanently cancel their subscriptions.
In the following sections, we will explore the architectural decisions made by the Netflix engineering team to support the various capabilities and scalability of its membership platform.
The High-Level Architecture of Netflix Membership Platform
Before diving into the details of Netflix's membership platform, let's take a step back and examine how the company's original pricing architecture was designed.
In the early days, Netflix's pricing model was relatively straightforward, with only a handful of plans to manage and basic functionality to support.
To meet these initial requirements, Netflix employed a lightweight, in-memory library. This approach proved to be quite efficient, as the limited scope of the pricing system allowed for a simple and streamlined design.
The diagram below illustrates this basic architecture:
As Netflix expanded its global presence and diversified its offerings, the lightweight, in-memory library that initially served the pricing architecture became insufficient.
The growing complexity and scope of the pricing catalog, coupled with its increasing importance across multiple applications, led to operational challenges. The library's size and dependencies made it difficult to maintain and scale, necessitating a transition to a more robust and scalable architecture.
The diagram below shows the high-level architecture of Netflix’s modern membership platform:
The membership platform consists of a dozen microservices and is designed to support four nines (99.99%) availability.
This high availability requirement originates from the platform's critical role in various user-facing flows. If any of the services experience downtime, it can directly impact the user experience.
The platform supports several key functionalities:
When a user hits the play button on Netflix, a direct call is made to the membership systems to determine the quality of service associated with their plan. Factors such as the allowed concurrent streams and supported devices for the user are considered. This flow handles the highest traffic volume, as Netflix serves billions of streaming requests every day.
The membership flow is triggered when a user accesses their account page. Actions like changing plans, managing extra members, and cancellations directly interact with the membership services.
The platform serves as the authoritative source for the total membership count at any given point in time. It emits events and writes to a persistent store, which is consumed by downstream analytics systems within and outside Netflix.
The key points about the architecture diagram are as follows:
The membership platform manages the membership plan and pricing catalog globally, with variations across different regions. The Plan Pricing Catalog Service handles rule management based on location-specific offerings.
Two CockroachDB databases are utilized to store plan pricing and code redemption information. The Member Pricing Service supports member actions, such as changing plans or adding extra members.
A dedicated microservice handles partner interactions, including bundle activations, signups, and integration with platforms like Apple's App Store.
Membership data is stored in Cassandra databases, which support the Subscription Service and History Tracking Service.
The platform not only caters to the 238 million active memberships but also focuses on former members and rejoin experiences.
The data generated by the platform is shipped to downstream consumers for deriving insights on signups and revenue projections.
Netflix’s choice of using CockroachDB and Cassandra is interesting.
While CockroachDB provides strong consistency, making it suitable for critical data such as the plan pricing information, Cassandra is a highly scalable NoSQL database for handling large volumes of membership data.
Also, the 99.99% availability indicates a strong focus on resilience and fault tolerance. Netflix is anyways famous for its comprehensive chaos engineering practices to proactively test the system’s resilience.
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The Signup Process Flow
Once users embark on their Netflix journey, they encounter plan selection options.
Rendering the plan selection page accurately is of utmost importance due to the geographical variations in currency, pricing, and available plans. Netflix's membership platform ensures that users are presented with the appropriate options based on their location and device type.
The diagram below shows the detailed steps involved in the Netflix signup process and the services that are triggered during the flow:
Here’s a look at each step in more detail.
The journey begins with users selecting a plan through Netflix's growth engineering apps. The plan details are retrieved from the Membership Plan Catalog service, which is backed by CockroachDB.
The Membership Plan Catalog Service loads and reads the plans based on predefined region and device type rules.
The retrieved plans are then presented to the user, allowing them to make an informed decision based on their preferences and budget.
Once the user chooses a plan, the flow progresses to the payment confirmation screen. Here, users provide their payment details and confirm their subscription.
Upon confirmation, the user clicks the "Start Membership" button, triggering the Membership State Service. This service persists the relevant information, such as the selected plan, price tier, and country, into the Cassandra database.
The Membership State Service also notifies the Billing Engineering Apps about the payment.
The Billing Engineering Apps generate an invoice based on the signup data obtained from the Membership Pricing Service.
The membership data is simultaneously written to the Membership History Service, ensuring a comprehensive record of the user's subscription history.
Events are published to signal the activation of the membership. These events trigger messaging pipelines responsible for sending welcome emails to the user and informing downstream systems for analytics purposes.
How Member History Is Tracked?
In the early stages of Netflix's membership platform, member history and data were tracked through application-level events.
While this approach sufficed initially, it became evident that a more granular and persistent data tracking solution was necessary as Netflix expanded and the complexity of member data increased.
To address this need, Netflix developed a robust solution based on the Change Data Capture (CDC) pattern.
For reference, CDC is a design pattern that directly captures changes made to a database and propagates those changes to downstream systems for further processing or analysis.
The diagram below shows how the CDC process works:
Adopting a CDC-like approach ensures that all delta changes made to the membership data sources are recorded in an append-only log system, which is backed by a Cassandra database.
The diagram below shows the flow of historical data in Netflix’s membership platform:
Let’s walk through the steps in this process:
Suppose there is an update request to modify the billing partner for a member. The request is received by the Membership Subscription Service.
The Membership Subscription Service processes the request and updates the relevant information in the Cassandra database.
In addition to updating the primary database, the updated data for the user is appended to the Membership History Service. This service is responsible for maintaining a historical record of all changes made to membership data.
The Membership History Service takes the appended data and inserts it into the Member History Table. This table serves as a persistent store for the historical data.
Finally, an event is emitted to notify downstream systems about the membership update. This allows other services and processes to react to the change and perform any necessary actions.
There are multiple benefits to this design:
Detailed Debugging: By maintaining a comprehensive history of membership data changes, the system enables detailed debugging and troubleshooting. Developers can trace the sequence of events and understand how the data evolved.
Event Replay and Reconciliation: The append-only nature of the log system allows for the ability to replay events. In case of data corruption or inconsistencies, the system can reconcile the data by replaying the events from a known good state.
Customer Service Analysis: The historical data captured by the Member History Service makes customer service analysis easy.
Technical Footprint of the Netflix Membership Platform
The technical landscape of the Netflix membership platform can be broadly categorized into two main areas: development and operations/monitoring.
Let's look at each area in detail.
Development Stack
The development stack of Netflix’s membership platform can be described by the following key points:
Netflix's architecture is optimized for handling high read requests per second (RPS) to support its massive user base.
The membership platform comprises over 12 microservices that communicate using gRPC at the HTTP layer. On a typical day, the platform can handle an impressive 3-4 million requests per second. To support this high volume, Netflix employs techniques like client-side caching at the gRPC level and in-memory caching of entire records to prevent CockroachDB from becoming a single point of failure.
The primary programming language used in the membership platform is Java with Spring Boot. However, in certain rewrite scenarios, Netflix is gradually transitioning to Kotlin.
Kafka plays a key role in message passing and interfacing with other teams, such as messaging and downstream analytics. This ensures smooth communication and data flow across different systems.
Netflix utilizes Spark and Flink for offline reconciliation tasks on their big data. These reconciliation jobs are crucial for maintaining data consistency and alignment between various systems of record within the membership platform, such as subscriptions and member history databases. The accuracy of data also extends to external systems, ensuring a consistent state across the entire ecosystem.
To ensure data consistency in online systems, Netflix employs lightweight transactions and uses databases like Cassandra. This approach guarantees the integrity and reliability of data across different services.
Operations and Monitoring
Netflix places a strong emphasis on observability and monitoring to ensure the smooth operation of its membership platform:
Extensive logging, dashboards, and distributed tracing mechanisms enable rapid error detection and resolution. In the complex microservice landscape of Netflix, these tools are essential for identifying and troubleshooting issues.
Production alerts are set up to track operational metrics and guarantee optimal service levels.
Operational data is leveraged to fuel machine learning models that enhance anomaly detection and enable automated issue resolution processes. All of this is done to try and maintain an uninterrupted streaming experience for the users.
Netflix utilizes tools like Kibana and Elasticsearch to create dashboards and analyze log data. In case of a spike in error rates, these dashboards allow the team to quickly identify the specific endpoint causing the issue and take corrective action.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Netflix's membership platform is a critical component of the company's success, enabling it to manage the entire lifecycle of a user's subscription. The platform has evolved from a simple, lightweight library to a robust, scalable architecture that can handle millions of requests per second
Some key takeaways to remember are as follows:
The membership platform is responsible for managing user signups, plan changes, renewals, and cancellations.
It utilizes a microservices architecture and makes use of databases like CockroachDB and Cassandra for storing membership data.
The platform captures and stores historical changes to membership data using CDC for debugging, event replay, and analytics.
References:
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