System Design: Design YouTube
by ByteByteGo
If you weren't amazed by youtube and your ability to view videos on demand along with hundreds of millions of other users, this video might do that for you.
My take on this video
If you weren't amazed by youtube and your ability to view videos on demand along with hundreds of millions of other users, this video might do that for you.
This was a pretty nice high-level, and maybe not so beginner-friendly explanation of the foundational system design of Youtube, specifically for uploading and serving videos.
Youtube is an absolute feat of engineering, and ByteByteGo manages to give you a peek at why that's even remotely true. Even stripped to the bare minimum - uploading and viewing the videos, Youtube needs an absolute menace of a backend system handling - and to be honest, at that scale, everything does.
This also might answer your question of why Cabin runs on embeds and doesn't host videos on its own - video hosting, especially at scale, is incredibly complex and computationally expensive. Hopefully I will get to get my hands dirty at it one day, and I will reach for far more from ByteByteGo than this singular video.
- aleksi