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Case studies in cloud migration: Netflix, Pinterest, and Symantec

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Summary (TL;DR)
In 2008, Netflix faced a crumbling backend architecture with single points of failure. Chief product officer Neil Hunt and his team decided to move to the cloud, specifically AWS. The migration was a multi-year effort, starting small and moving services one by one. Netflix embraced ephemerality, using Chaos Monkey to test resilience. The move allowed Netflix to scale from 2007 to 2015: streaming hours increased 1000-fold and subscribers grew 8x. Pinterest and Symantec also undertook cloud migrations, using early adopters and proofs of concept to win hearts and minds. Legacy companies like Symantec faced bigger challenges due to rigid organizational barriers and applications not designed for cloud.