In a nondescript office park minutes from Disneyland sits a nondescript warehouse. Inside this nameless, faceless building, an era is ending.

The building is a Netflix DVD distribution plant. Once a bustling ecosystem that processed 1.2 million DVDs a week, employed 50 people and generated millions of dollars in revenue, it now has just six employees left to sift through the metallic discs. And even that will cease on Friday, when Netflix officially shuts the door on its origin story and stops mailing out its trademark red envelopes.

“It’s sad when you get to the end, because it’s been a big part of all of our lives for so long,” Hank Breeggemann, the general manager of Netflix’s DVD division, said in an interview. “But everything runs its cycle. We had a great 25-year run and changed the entertainment industry, the way people viewed movies at home.”

When Netflix began mailing DVDs in 1998 — the first movie shipped was “Beetlejuice” — no one in Hollywood expected the company to eventually upend the entire entertainment industry. It started as a brainstorm between Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph, successful businessmen looking to reinvent the DVD rental business. No due dates, no late fees, no monthly rental limits.

Netflix’s DVD operations still serve around one million customers, many of them very loyal.

Bean Porter, 35, lives in St. Charles, Ill., and has subscribed to Netflix’s DVD and streaming services since 2015. She said she was “devastated” that there would be no more DVDs. Ms. Porter was able to use her subscription to watch DVDs of shows like “Yellowstone” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” — episodic television made for other streaming services that would have required her to buy additional subscriptions.

She and her husband also watch three or four movies a week and find Netflix’s DVD library to be deeper and more diverse than any other subscription service. She often hosts cookouts in her backyard and invites neighbors to watch movies on an outdoor screen. That is easier to do with a DVD, she said, than with streaming because of internet connectivity issues. And she has become involved with the DVD operations’ social media channel, posting videos, interacting with other customers and chatting directly with the social media managers working for the company.

“I’m pretty angry,” she said. “I’m just going to have to do streaming, and I feel like what they’re doing is forcing me into having less options.”

To ease the backlash, Netflix is allowing its DVD customers to hold on to their final rentals. Ms. Porter intends to keep “The Breakfast Club,” “Goonies” and “The Sound of Music.” As for the last DVD she intends to watch: She’s leaving that up to fate.