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Why YouTube Never Runs Out of Storage? It's NOT just CLOUD!

Ujjawal Tyagi on February 22, 2024

Have you ever wondered, despite all these years and an absolutely insane amount of video data being generated. Why YouTube haven't run out of space...
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elanatframework profile image
elanatframework

Google does not use RAID configuration.
Google use horizontal scaling.

In horizontal scaling, the complexity of adding data is 1 (O(1)), the complexity of removing data is 1; but editing is more complicated. If you have noticed, in many big services you cannot edit and you have to delete and add data again.

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Ujjawal Tyagi

Appreciate the insight! Horizontal scaling definitely offers advantages in terms of scalability and complexity.
About editing data, then yes Ig it can sometimes be more complex due to the distributed nature of horizontal scaling. It's fascinating to see how different approaches like this contribute to the architecture of large-scale services.

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vikrantstechoon

They also compress old videos that people are not watching anymore.
Some videos were available at 1080p. Now they are just at 240P.

So, if one server farm is full, it will have some room in months or years.

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Ujjawal Tyagi

This does make sense! But does this mean that in the future, we won't be able to watch videos in the same quality as those currently at 4K? :)
However, the videos I uploaded like 6-7 years ago on YouTube are still the same.

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Ethan • Edited

Youtube's compression does loose some quality like you said. This video makes it visible to the human eye and talks about why they think this happens and how the lossless compression parts work. youtube.com/watch?v=JR4KHfqw-oE

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ujjawaltyagi profile image
Ujjawal Tyagi

Thanks for sharing the video! It's a great explanation of how compression on YouTube happens. It does make sense on how YouTube manages its vast library of videos. Appreciate the insight!

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Fidelis

I found this insightful. You’ve been able to point out plausible answers to the question. I believe there remains some other things/technology that has been implemented together with your highlighted solutions that Google is using to keep up with the vast amount of data generated on Youtube

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Ujjawal Tyagi

Thank you for your feedback! I'm glad you found the insights helpful and it's quite possible that Google has implemented various other innovative technologies and strategies to efficiently handle the ever-growing data on their platform but the question is will they let us know about it