Comment by g9yuayon

A key reason for Netflix to have an easy-to-operate infrastructure is that Netflix prioritizes productivity and scalability. They specifically did three things:

1. No fixed deadline, with a few exceptions of course, for platform-related projects.

2. Promotion/salary negotiation was not tied directly to release of external features.

3. A single engineer could be responsible for more than one service for the entire company, with 24x7 oncall.

With Netflix establishing such incentives, engineers naturally focus on getting infrastructure right, to the point that oncall 24x7 is a non-issue.

So, yeah, culture matters, big time.

Edit: another incentive was that a service was measured by its adoption. The more people praised it, the more successful the service would be. Requiring meetings to get buy-in for a new service was considered a sign of potential failure. As a result, every single team focused on making the value proposition of their services obvious. Path of least resistance was a given instead of a debated topic.