Press Play on Data: Netflix's Journey from Streams to Gaming Insights

Netflix's Data Mesh platform serves as our foundation for stream processing, but recent innovations have dramatically expanded its capabilities and accessibility. This presentation explores how these advancements in Data Mesh enabled the successful development of our Games Analytics Platform, as Netflix's games portfolio expanded to 100+ games across TV, mobile, and web platforms.

We'll first trace Data Mesh's evolution from a simple data movement platform to a comprehensive real-time processing ecosystem. Attendees will learn how the platform powers business-critical applications while maintaining security and scalability. A key advancement we'll highlight is the introduction of Streaming SQL, which replaced complex low-level programming with an intuitive, declarative approach. This evolution, alongside robust infrastructure-as-code practices, has democratized streaming data access across Netflix, enabling domain experts to build sophisticated data products without specialized stream processing knowledge.

The second part of our presentation showcases these innovations in action through the Games Analytics Platform case study. As Netflix ventured into games, our Games Data team leveraged Data Mesh to build a robust data processing layer that helps scale their data teams to meet the diverse data needs of game stakeholders. We’ll demonstrate how the SQL Processor’s user-friendly features coupled with Infrastructure as Code capabilities within Data Mesh enabled Netflix Games to scale their data and analytics ecosystem with minimal technical overhead.

Join us to discover how established data infrastructure can evolve to meet new business challenges, the architectural decisions that facilitated this evolution, and how the synergy between platform innovation and practical application resulted in a scalable data ecosystem supporting Netflix's growing gaming portfolio.