How Netflix/Google Design Highly Available Systems (Architecture Breakdown)

How Netflix/Google Design Highly Available Systems (Architecture Breakdown)

Netflix and Google operate massive global systems that must tolerate regional failures, traffic spikes, and dependency outages. Their architectures highlight consistent design principles rather than a single blueprint.

Netflix Architecture Highlights

Netflix focuses on resilience in a multi-region, cloud-native environment:

• Active-active regions with traffic shifting via global DNS.
• Service discovery and client-side load balancing using libraries like Ribbon.
• Chaos engineering to validate resilience continuously.
• Edge caching through Open Connect to reduce latency.

Google Architecture Highlights

Google emphasizes global consistency with strong infrastructure primitives:

• Borg and Kubernetes for scheduling and isolation.
• Spanner for globally consistent transactions.
• Global load balancing with Anycast routing.
• SLO-driven operations to balance reliability with velocity.

Common Principles

Both companies rely on:

• Redundancy across zones and regions.
• Strict latency budgets and load shedding.
• Automated failover and traffic shaping.
• Deep observability with tracing and metrics.

Spring Boot Example: Regional Failover via Client-Side Routing

@Service
public class RegionAwareClient {
    private final WebClient primaryClient;
    private final WebClient secondaryClient;

    public RegionAwareClient(WebClient.Builder builder) {
        this.primaryClient = builder.baseUrl("https://api.primary.example").build();
        this.secondaryClient = builder.baseUrl("https://api.secondary.example").build();
    }

    public Mono<String> fetch(String path) {
        return primaryClient.get()
                .uri(path)
                .retrieve()
                .bodyToMono(String.class)
                .timeout(Duration.ofMillis(200))
                .onErrorResume(ex -> secondaryClient.get()
                        .uri(path)
                        .retrieve()
                        .bodyToMono(String.class));
    }
}

Summary

Netflix optimizes for availability with aggressive resilience engineering, while Google combines global consistency with sophisticated infrastructure. Both rely on redundancy, automation, and strong observability to achieve high availability at scale.