How Culture Impacts Technology Choice: A Review of Netflix’s Use of Microservices
I recently had the opportunity to read the book “No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention” by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer of Netflix, and it dawned on me that while this book wasn’t at all focused on Netflix’s technology, the global company-wide culture had a significant impact on its technology choices. The book focuses on the many times Netflix had to reinvent itself and transform its business in order to revolutionize the entertainment industry. This revolution was made possible by an equally radical and formerly unheard of approach to a company culture that not only influenced how we build technology today but also thinks about company culture on a global scale.
Needless to say, Netflix’s technology choices went on to influence the way the entire industry thinks about architecture built for a massive scale. In this post, I’d like to take a look at how Netflix’s culture was the backbone that enabled its bleeding edge technology decisions — and specifically microservices. Some of what I write here is actually the direct influence of my own personal love-hate relationship with microservices. This book afforded me a newfound perspective on how to succeed at building challenging technology architectures to enable the business, by ensuring the right cultural mechanisms are in place first. I’ll posit that if not for Netflix’s unique approach to company culture, their technology choices would not have been possible either, and ultimately neither would their success.
So just to dive into my inspiration for this post a bit more, my love-hate relationship with microservices began when I was a software engineer at eBay trying to tame a crazy monster of a monolith. It was so complex and vast and no one really understood all of it, that I learned how truly difficult it is to break up a monolith that is the beating heart of a business.
