Netflix’s Distributed Counter Abstraction

Netflix’ s Distributed Counter Abstraction

摘要

In our previous blog post, we introduced Netflix’s TimeSeries Abstraction, a distributed service designed to store and query large volumes of temporal event data with low millisecond latencies. Today, we’re excited to present the Distributed Counter Abstraction. This counting service, built on top of the TimeSeries Abstraction, enables distributed counting at scale while maintaining similar low latency performance. As with all our abstractions, we use our Data Gateway Control Plane to shard, configure, and deploy this service globally.

Distributed counting is a challenging problem in computer science. In this blog post, we’ll explore the diverse counting requirements at Netflix, the challenges of achieving accurate counts in near real-time, and the rationale behind our chosen approach, including the necessary trade-offs.

Note: When it comes to distributed counters, terms such as ‘accurate’ or ‘precise’ should be taken with a grain of salt. In this context, they refer to a count very close to accurate, presented with minimal delays.