I Tried Building a Netflix-Style System on AWS — Here’s What Actually Matters

A lot of system design content looks impressive… until you actually try to build it. I’ve seen architectures that look clean on paper but fall apart the moment real traffic hits. So instead of theory, I decided to break things down from a builder’s perspective: What does it actually take to build a scalable, Netflix-style system on AWS? Let’s get into it—no fluff. 🧱 1. The Real Architecture (Not Just Diagrams) At a high level, your system should look like this: Users → CloudFront → API Gateway → Load Balancer → Microservices (EKS/ECS) → Cache (Redis) → Databases (RDS/DynamoDB) → Monitoring (CloudWatch + Prometheus) When I first started designing systems like this, I underestimated how important each layer is. Skip one, and everything downstream suffers. 🌐 2. CDN + API Gateway: Your First Line of Defense Before your backend even sees traffic: CloudFront handles global content delivery API Gateway manages routing, throttling, and security Why this matters: If you don’t control traffic at