An overview of the Netflix billing system

1. Nirmal Varadarajan

2. What we do?
Signup/Rejoin
Billing History
Customer
Support
Billing Service
• Membership Renewals and Charges
• Cancellations
• Manage Netflix Balances & Discounts
• Customer Satisfaction support
• Payment Failure Management
• Finance data pipeline
• Taxes
Insights

3. What we are working on
Over 48 million
subscriber in 41 different
countries/ several
payment types
• Build a scalable solution to
keep up with future
subscriber growth
• Create a flexible application
that will lend to changing
business need
• Clean workflow to enable
graceful recovery from failure
• Test driven development
• High Data integrity
Agile and
Iterative

4. High level Architecture

5. Technologies we leverage
AWS cloud to enable scalability
Cassandra for multi regional data store support
Hadoop for data pipeline and insights
Spring integration for work flow management

6. Work flow overview

7. Loosely coupled integration
• Applications with clear focus and separation of
concerns
• Loosely coupled via an integration workflow
• Concerns across flows are monitored closely using
dashboards
• Separation of concerns helps achieve modular easily
testable code.

8. We will continue working on…
• Improved events data pipeline using Kafka
• Using publish-subscribe to improve on our current pipeline
• Provide flexibility to modify data by subscribing application
• Real time analytics for push monitoring
• Variations in Billing Behaviors for Recurring Subscriptions
• We are always looking for ways to make the customer experience better
• Providing grace periods on billing failure
• Providing flexibility to choose billing days
• Providing variations in behavior based on Payment types
• Seamless financial reporting
• Financial reporting is complex due to variations in payment processing
• Provide application flexibility to handle these variations
• Improve resiliency and consistency
• Ability to scale based on day of month
• Advanced anomaly detection and circuit breakers
• Build trouble shooting dashboards, Metrics, Tools

9. We are hiring
Contact nvaradarajan@netflix.com