Why did Netflix use NGINX and FreeBSD to build their own CDN? by Gleb Smirnoff
NGINX0 HN recommenders · 2016–2021
40K views · talk · dated · Uploaded 2015-02-26
Gleb Smirnoff explains why Netflix built its own CDN on FreeBSD and NGINX, and how Netflix and NGINX Inc. collaborate on the software. It is a conference talk about open-source choices for video delivery.
Cited in FreeBSD vs Linux debates as the source for why Netflix chose FreeBSD, with commenters reading the GPL as the main factor.
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6 comments from Hacker News
Netflix delivers all video streaming content via FreeBSD which makes up 37% of all internet traffic. [LINK] They also contribute to FreeBSD core. It is not just an "appliance" as some people seem to want to point to. [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] In addition, a guy I met, who worked at Yahoo, told me about 25% of Yahoo still runs FreeBSD as of two years ago.
Well the answer why Apple chose BSD is pretty simple...license and maturity. But Netflix chose it because of that: [VIDEO]
This presentation also makes no indication that FreeBSD was chosen because it had better performance than Linux: [VIDEO] Seems GPL already ruled Linux out.
Both of these things suggest they had many other reasons to chose FreeBSD, and neither suggests FreeBSD was faster than Linux: - [LINK] - [VIDEO] Seems GPL was a problem for them. EDIT: another source suggesting GPL avoidance was the primary reason for choosing FreeBSD over Linux: [LINK] - and the presenter also says that the performance comparisons they have done between Linux and FreeBSD is not exactly fair because they did not do all the engineering work on Linux that they did on FreeBSD.
> There are plenty of talks, papers, etc from both Juniper, Netflix, etc on why they made their choices, but your response is merely "could also be they did not understand how to configure Linux" without any evidence. Here are the only sources I could find that gave some reasons for Netflix's choice: - [LINK] - [VIDEO] Neither of them suggest FreeBSD was faster than Linux in their tests. From both of those sources I would say avoiding GPL was the primary consideration. If there is something to back your claim up, link to it. If you cannot link to it then how the heck do you expect me to find it. I'm not the person claiming it exists.
>I cannot help being a bit sad that contribution like this will only benefit the few people that use FreeBSD Same could be said the other way around, the thing is Linux can implement it and even take the code, the other way is rather difficult....so much for freedom. And not sure what you mean with "few" people, the few Playstation 3/4/5 users? Juniper? OpnSense/Pfsense installations? Or the few Truenas/Freenas users? >Or not something else enough? [VIDEO]