ENHANCING NETFLIX RELIABILITY WITH SERVICE-LEVEL PRIORITIZED LOAD SHEDDING

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

Netflix initially implemented prioritized load shedding at the API gateway level, then extended it to individual service level for finer-grained control and better cloud capacity utilization. One example is its PlayAPI, which prioritized user-initiated requests over pre-fetch requests during an infrastructure outage, maintaining high availability for critical requests. Netflix also created an internal library for prioritized load shedding and experimented with CPU-based and IO-based load shedding.