Eli5: what happens on the server when one selects to watch a movie on Netflix and how the architecture allows 500k other people to watch the same movie almost concurrently?
In: Technology
Two words: caching and locality. Streaming services like Netflix have smaller servers scattered all around the world that serve content to the users geographically close to them.
If a user requests a movie that isn’t cached on their nearest server, that server can ask around and receive a copy from somewhere else in the CDN.
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