Page 44 - Federal Computer Week, January/February 2019

Ideas
The government should be more like Netflix
To truly benefit from shared services and cloud technology, agencies should build a repository of microservice business routines
BY MICHAEL GARLAND AND GAURAV PAL
When it comes to digital infrastructure, Netflix’s scale and efficiency are staggering. Imagine the following: 19.1 percent of the entire U.S. internet bandwidth is consumed by people streaming Netflix video content every night. In 2016, it was estimated that Netflix delivered 1 billion hours of content per month to a customer base of 135 million subscribers in 190 countries.
By many accounts, illegal password sharing means there are actually 2.5 viewers for every legitimate Netflix sub- scription, bringing the
real number of view-
ers closer to 340 mil-
lion — which exceeds
the population of the
United States. To state
this as a business
proposition: Netflix is
equipped to support
the possibility of 340
million people request-
ing instantaneous video
streams to 340 million
devices in 340 million
locations around the
world, simultaneously.
If you assumed it
would cost a fortune
to do this, you would
be wrong. In its most
recent annual report for
2017, Netflix revealed that its technology and development spending was only $1 billion. That’s not pocket change, but it is roughly equivalent to just 9 percent of the company’s revenue. That is profoundly low for what is primarily a technology company, particularly when measured against the enormity of the service Netflix provides.
Meanwhile, the federal government’s well-known slow adoption of new technology makes it look like an old Block- buster video store by comparison. The U.S. government’s known IT spending is approximately $92 billion a year. To
put that dollar figure in context, our government spends more on IT than the entire U.S. Postal Service collects in a year ($70 billion) and only about 4 percent less than the total annual revenue of Boeing ($96 billion), the 76th larg- est public company in the world. Now that is real money.
How Netflix does it
Historically, most attempts to reduce the government’s IT spending have focused on the reduction of duplicative systems and the need to create more shared services among agen- cies. For instance, the Government Account- ability Office report- ed in 2011 that the government had no less than 622 human resources manage- ment systems, at a cost of about $2.4 billion, when many of them could have been collapsed into a shared service for use across multiple
agencies.
More recently, the
focus has been on a
shift toward cloud computing, with the promise of paying for IT infrastruc- ture as a service, closely matched to actual consumption,
only after the fact.
The brilliance of Netflix’s massively efficient IT is that
the company has cracked the code on the very thing the government seeks: a marriage of shared services and cloud technology. Under the leadership of Adrian Cockcroft, Net- flix made a fundamental architecture decision to deploy cloud-based microservices that are provisioned via a server- less cloud execution model.
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January/February 2019 FCW.COM