If you know your access patterns really well and they are non-relational, then you can design the best possible tables for dyanmoDB. In such a case DynamoDB works and scales amazingly. Ofc, you cannot do multi table relationships etc shoehorning a relational scheme onto DynamoDB does not work.
Netflix has been the worst performing and lowest quality video stream of any of the streaming services. Fuzzy video, lots of visual noise and artifacts. Just plan bad and this is on the 4k plan on 1GB fiber on a 4k Apple TV. I can literally tell when someone is watching Netflix without knowing because it looks like shit.
It's not AV1's fault though, I'm pretty sure it's that they cheap out on the bitrate. Apple is among the highest bitrates (other than Sony's weird hardware locked streaming service).
I actually blamed AV1 for the macro-blocking and generally awful experience of watching horror films on Netflix for a long time. Then I realized other sources using AV1 were better.
If you press ctl-alt-shift-d while the video is playing you'll note that most of the time that the bitrate is appallingly low, and also that Netflix plays their own original content using higher bitrate HEVC rather than AV1.
That's because they actually want it to look good. For partner content they often default back to lower bitrate AV1, because they just don't care.
This is actually their DRM speaking. If you watch it on a Linux device or basically anything that isn’t a smart TV on the latest OS, they limit you to a 720p low bitrate stream, even if you pay for 4k. (See Louis Rossman’s video on the topic)
Have same experience as OP on newest ATV 4k.
Good it's not only me who wonders how is it possible that they describe such great approaches to encoding, but final result is just so bad.
Good that the OCAs really work and are very inspiring in content delivery domain.
I also find Netflix video quality shockingly bad and oddly inconsistent. I think they just don’t prioritize video quality in the same way as say apple or Disney does.
I cancelled Netflix for this exact reason. 4K Netflix looks worse than 720 YouTube, yet I pay(paid) for Netflix 4K, and at roughly 2x what I paid for Netflix when it launched. It's genuinely a disgrace how they can even claim with a straight face that you're actually watching 4K. The last price rise was the tipping point and I tapped out after 11 years.
I was able to improve things somewhat by going to https://www.netflix.com/settings/playback/<myprofileid> and changing "Data usage per screen" from Auto to High
Probably some function of your location to data centers. I find hbo max to be aysmal these days. But I've learned to just stop caring about this stuff since no one else in my life does
I run Redis across dozens of applications. So when Valkey became available for a discounted price on AWS I was excited. We finally got around to trying it out about 2 months ago and all was going well. No noticeable difference in performance. Until Valkey just died. It died in such a way that AWS still thought it was running happily but it was completely offline. It took 12+ hours for it to come up again and then it happened again... AWS researched the issue for 2 weeks and couldn't figure it out. It will be a long time before we attempt to use Valkey for anything critical in the future. We since have replace that Valkey with Redis under the same workload and have no issues.
Probably AWS issue. Our production RDS postgres cluster did that a few months back. Just stopped responding on the network. Health checks were fine. AWS support was mostly useless and couldn't work it out in an hour, despite having their top tier enterprise support, so with customers down we had to create a whole new cluster and do a restore from backup which took 4 hours.
RDS is now gone. It's on a couple of EC2 instances with replication, hourly EBS snapshots and daily shipping to S3.
I'm loathed to use AWS's "encapsulated" services for anything since.
I think these are isolated incidents though. We’ve ran several tens of RDS clusters for 6 years running, and nothing has ever gone wrong. Maybe the ap-northeast-1 region is well maintained?
"completely offline" also doesn't sound like a problem with a software project. At best it's a particular managed service experiencing downtime. Would Linux be to blame if my power supply goes up in smoke?
It’s a bit confusing to me exactly what went wrong. I think that when you have a redis/valkey cluster with multiple nodes and you use the cluster uri, there must be some kind of load balancer or custom routing. When we would attempt to connect to valkey the connection would look good, but when we would submit commands to it they would never execute. We had written our application so that it would operate with no issue (just slower) if the cache goes down. In this case, connections looked good but no work was actually being done. AWS support suggested we restart the nodes but because they were not responding they never shut down … or at least it took a really long time. They were never able to tell us what actually happened. My guess is that valkey command execution got stuck somehow but was still able to create new connections.
Can’t be reached outside the network that the instance and health check are running on? Maybe available in one AZ, but not on the one that’s trying to connect.
Because when you’re in production with many users, it’s not worth the risk when you’ve already been burned, especially when the downside is a small discount.
I’m lost at why a DB (Cassandra) with better write performance than read performance was ever selected for a messaging system. I feel like it’s obvious that a message will be read more than it is written (once).
The fact that it has better write speed than read speed doesn't mean that it has bad read speed. It just happens to have even better write speed.
It's like how I connect my phone to my home's cable connection to send a big file. It is better at downloading than uploading, but that doesn't mean it's not the best solution for uploading.
The assurance you get from the examples in the article are pretty basic, but there are contracts you’ll have a lot of trouble encoding in the type system, like “arguments are integers in ascending order.”
