By Violetta Pidvolotska and Naveen Mareddy Stratum is Netflix’s internal serverless media processing platform, shaped by over a decade of experience developing large-scale distributed systems. It powers a wide range of media workloads — including encoding, packaging, inspection, and quality scoring — behind playback, advertising, studio workflows, AI embeddings, and more. Engineers develop Stratum functions by packaging application code and OS dependencies into OCI images.