Storage / Lakehouse
Show S3 layout, Iceberg responsibilities, replayability, compaction, schema evolution, and freshness by layer.
On this page
Bronze / Silver / Gold
Make Bronze, Silver, and Gold feel like a living operating model.
Bronze is immutable raw truth, Silver is cleaned and trusted, and Gold is curated for business use, so replay and correction stay possible without corrupting official metrics.
Quick jumps
Click to jumpMonthly users
200M-250M
Docs use both 200M+ and 250M assumptions
Daily active users
80M
Used for heartbeat and Kafka math
Peak concurrency
15M
Useful for QoE and live ops workloads
Make the medallion layers feel operational
The lakehouse must explain immutability, trust, and official reporting visually.
Medallion layer explorer
Bronze
Inputs
- Raw JSON / Avro events
- CDC envelopes
- Partner files
- CDN / service logs
Rules
- Do not mutate source truth
- Partition by ingestion date / hour
- Hot retention for replay, cold retention for long-term audit
- Restricted raw access because payloads may still carry sensitive fields
Explain storage paths, versions, and retention
Users should see why Iceberg snapshots and S3 layout matter for replay and recovery.
Event backbone
AWS
MSK
Open source
Kafka + Schema Registry
Why here
Streaming compute
AWS
Kinesis Data Analytics / EMR on EKS
Open source
Flink
Why here
Batch compute
AWS
EMR / Glue
Open source
Spark + dbt
Why here
Lakehouse format
AWS
S3 + Glue Catalog
Open source
Iceberg
Why here
Serving
AWS
Redshift / Athena
Open source
Trino / Pinot
Why here
Use a clean lakehouse framing line
Keep Bronze, Silver, and Gold responsibilities clear.
Say This In Interview
Bronze is immutable raw truth, Silver is cleaned and trusted, and Gold is curated for business use, so replay and correction stay possible without corrupting official metrics.
30-second answer
FastBronze is immutable raw truth, Silver is cleaned and trusted, and Gold is curated for business use, so replay and correction stay possible without corrupting official metrics.
2-minute answer
BalancedShow S3 layout, Iceberg responsibilities, replayability, compaction, schema evolution, and freshness by layer. Focus on MODELING, 8 min, Make Bronze, Silver, and Gold feel like a living operating model..
Deep answer
DeepBronze is immutable raw truth, Silver is cleaned and trusted, and Gold is curated for business use, so replay and correction stay possible without corrupting official metrics. Then go layer by layer through MODELING, 8 min, Make Bronze, Silver, and Gold feel like a living operating model., including trade-offs, failure handling, and why this shape is right for the consumer SLAs.
Last reviewed June 2026 · By Prasoon Parashar
Numbers are interview assumptions, not real Netflix internal figures.