Architecture comparison

Netflix vs Spotify

Spotify runs closer to the foundational model (Direct API) than Netflix (Off the LLM map (in-house non-LLM ML)). No shared foundational model — different bets.

Netflix

Streaming Media

Proximity

Off the LLM map (in-house non-LLM ML)

Models

—

Cloud · datastore

HybridCassandraMySQL/RDSCockroachDBEVCacheDynamoDBElasticsearchS3Redshift

Compliance

SOC 2 (inferred from large-scale AWS SaaS practices)[2][9]ISO 27001 (inferred, typical for global consumer SaaS on AWS)[2][9]PCI-DSS for payments and billing workflows (inferred)[8][9]

Architecture

Netflix runs a cloud‑native microservices control plane almost entirely on AWS (EC2, RDS/MySQL, DynamoDB, Cassandra, CockroachDB, Kafka, S3, etc.) while its proprietary Open Connect CDN appliances form a separate data plane deployed at ISPs for video delivery.[2][3][6][12] Client apps (web, mobile, TV) talk to backend microservices via APIs/GraphQL, with extensive use of in‑house open‑source tooling (Zuul, Eureka, Spinnaker, EVCache) and AWS services for storage, streaming, and analytics.[3][6][8][12]

Spotify

Streaming Media

Proximity

Direct API

Models

OpenAI · GPT

Cloud · datastore

GCPApache CassandraGoogle BigQueryPostgreSQLGoogle Cloud BigtableGoogle Cloud StorageRedisHDFS

Compliance

SOC 2ISO 27001GDPRCCPA

Architecture

Spotify runs a large-scale microservices architecture on Google Cloud Platform, with thousands of backend services and streaming/batch data pipelines built around Pub/Sub, Dataflow/Beam, and BigQuery for recommendation and analytics workloads.[5][9][10] Audio is stored in cloud object storage and delivered via multiple CDNs, while Cassandra and other stores serve user metadata, playlists, and real-time features.[3][5][7]

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