Scalability at YouTube
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN mostly cites it as evidence that YouTube was built on Python and as background on how it scaled.
What it is
A PyCon 2012 talk by early YouTube engineer Mike Solomon on how YouTube scaled its architecture, which is mostly Python.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2012 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends gitarr · 2012-09 · on “We need more PyCon US 2013 submissions”
YouTube (owned by Google) is mainly Python. Here a talk from Pycon 2012, the technical part starts around 10 min. in: [this video]
Cites gitarr · 2012-03 · on “Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?”
The real beauty of Python is the fact that it is easy for beginning programmers, yes, but it has also a lot to offer for experienced coders concerning all the advanced things they might need. It's no accident that services like Dropbox[1] or YouTube[2], both arguably very complex systems, are relying on Python as their language of choice. [1] [LINK] [2] [this video]
Cites tbatterii · 2013-04 · on “Security incident update”
>Facebook and YouTube were both created later, and in PHP youtube was always done in python as far as I understand. [this video] But yeah, back in 2002-3 coldfusion was an option.
Cites Jugurtha · 2021-09 · on “Ask HN: When to switch startup backend from Python to Golang?”
Scalability at YouTube: [this video] The Python is the less likely think that will suffocate you. What did you suffer from in past projects with each of these languages?
Cites Leftium · 2024-02 · on “Ask HN: Can I create a mobile and Web App using a Python/Python Framework?”
For reference, YouTube runs on Python[1,2,3]: > 1. Python and Django: YouTube’s backend is predominantly written in Python, offering a balance of performance and readability. > 2. Google Cloud Platform... > 3. Java and C++: YouTube also utilizes Java and C++ for specific backend services, as they provide better performance for certain tasks. --- A long time ago, I looked into these Python frameworks: - [LINK] - [LINK] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [this video]
Cites teitoklien · 2024-05 · on “Ask HN: Video streaming is expensive yet YouTube "seems" to do it for free. How?”
They improve their stack on multiple fronts 1 - They use their own custom hardware encoders now optimised for their scale (previously they’d use a ton of intel cpu for encoding) This is often not possible for smaller startups to have their own custom hardware, but one could setup their own Xilinx FPGA based hardware accelerated encoding servers, Xillinx Alveo Boards are popular for media acceleration, they support both ffmpeg and gstreamer for acceleration needs. Nvidia Nvenc encoding is decent too but mostly for the most popular encoding types, and honestly an fpga based accelerator is probably better after cpu unless you have gpus lying around. 2 - Much lower bandwith costs, a lot of start