Re-Architecting the Video Gatekeeper

This is the story about how the Content Setup Engineering team used Hollow, a Netflix OSS technology, to re-architect and simplify an essential component in our content pipeline — delivering a large amount of business value in the process. Each movie and show on the Netflix service is carefully curated to ensure an optimal viewing experience. The team responsible for this curation is Title Operations.

Title Operations will confirm, among other things: When a title meets all of the minimum above requirements, then it is allowed to go live on the service. Gatekeeper is the system at Netflix responsible for evaluating the “liveness” of videos and assets on the site. A title doesn’t become visible to members until Gatekeeper approves it — and if it can’t validate the setup, then it will assist Title Operations by pointing out what’s missing from the baseline customer experience.

Gatekeeper accomplishes its prescribed task by aggregating data from multiple upstream systems, applying some business logic, then producing an output detailing the status of each video in each country.

Source: medium.com