Netflix Continues Experiencing Great Performance In Using FreeBSD For Their CDN

It's been a love affair going on for years, but should you not already know, Netflix has long been leveraging FreeBSD as part of its in-house content delivery network (CDN) for serving its millions of users with on-demand video. This weekend at FOSDEM, Jonathan Looney of the company talked about their usage of FreeBSD.

Netflix remains one of the big FreeBSD studios and continues leveraging that BSD operating system for its network performance on their "Open Connect" CDN. What is even more unique about their FreeBSD setup is they closely track the CURRENT/head version of FreeBSD rather than sticking to the stable releases.

With FreeBSD on commodity server hardware they are able to achieve 90 Gb/s serving on TLS-encrypted connections with not even full CPU utilization. They rely upon the very latest FreeBSD code in order to stay up-to-date with bleeding-edge features and capabilities. Netflix also tries to upstream their FreeBSD changes where deemed suitable.

Those wanting to learn more about the Netflix usage of FreeBSD that missed out on the presentation at FOSDEM 2019 in Brussels, there is the PDF slide deck available.