Building Service Topology at Scale: Architecture, Challenges, and Lessons Learned

By Parth Jain , Rakesh Sukumar , Yingwu Zhao , Renzo Sanchez-Silva & Nathan Fisher A deep dive into the engineering challenges of building a real-time service dependency map at Netflix scale: from streaming architectures and distributed aggregation pipelines to time-travel queries and the methodology that made it work. Introduction In our first post , we introduced the problem: engineers at Netflix needed a unified, real-time view of service dependencies to troubleshoot faster, understand blast radius, and navigate our distributed architecture. We described our multi-source approach, combining