SPECIAL EDITION

11 Reasons Why YouTube Was Able to Support 100 Million Video Views a Day With Only 9 Engineers.

1/ Magic Flywheel

They took a scientific approach to scalability: collect and analyze system data.

2/ Boring Tech Stack

They kept their tech stack simple and used proven technologies.

3/ Keep It Simple

They considered software architecture to be the core of scalability. They didn’t follow buzzwords to scale. But kept the architecture simple.

4/ Choose Your Battles

They outsourced their problems:

- Put the popular videos on a CDN

- Put thumbnails in Google BigTable

5/ Pillars of Scalability

They relied on 3 pillars of scalability:

- Stateless

- Replication

- Partitioning

6/ Solid Engineering Team

They kept the team size small with only 9 engineers. And their team was great at cross-disciplinary skills.

7/ Don’t Repeat Yourself

They used a multi-level cache to prevent repeating expensive operations. Also it allowed them to scale reads.

8/ Rank Your Stuff

They ranked video-watch traffic over everything else. So, they kept a dedicated cluster of resources for video-watch traffic. It provided high availability.

9/ Prevent the Thundering Herd

They added jitter to prevent the thundering herd problem. For example, they added a jitter to the cache expiry of a popular video.

10/ Play the Long Game

They focused on macro-level of things: algorithms, and scalability. They traded off efficiency for scalability. For example, they chose Python over C.

11/ Adaptive Evolution

They tweaked the system to meet their requirements. They didn’t waste time writing code to restrict people.

Instead adopted good engineering practices - coding conventions to improve their code structure.

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