How Netflix Scales to 270 Million Users with Java and Microservices

Netflix serves 270 million users through a sophisticated microservices architecture built primarily with Java. The platform splits operations between a control plane on AWS handling user interactions and recommendations, and a proprietary CDN called Open Connect with 17,000+ servers worldwide for content delivery. Key innovations include circuit breaker patterns with Hystrix, service discovery with Eureka, reactive programming with RxJava, and chaos engineering practices. The architecture employs polyglot persistence across multiple databases, extensive observability with petabytes of telemetry data, and hundreds of machine learning models for personalized recommendations.