Peter Hodge followed up with a pointer to the YouTube talk at the Google Seattle Conference on Scalability by Cuong Do. Peter said that his Virsona technical team found very useful in planning the rollout of their new service. The talk is also available in a larger and more legible format from http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6304964351441328559 There are a number of “related videos” on the Google Video site from the Scalability Conference that are also worth a look.
The abstract reads:
This talk will discuss some of the scalability challenges that have arisen during YouTube’s short but extraordinary history. YouTube has grown incredibly rapidly despite having had only a handful of people responsible for scaling the site. Topics of discussion will include hardware scalability, software scalability, and database scalability.
Speaker: Cuong Do Cuong is currently an engineering manager at YouTube/Google. He was part of the engineering team that scaled the YouTube software and hardware infrastructure from its infancy to its current scale. Prior to YouTube/Google, he held various software development and management positions at PayPal and Inktomi.
The talk is not only very informative but offers a perspective that there was more to YouTube’s success than “viral marketing.” The team built on a lot of solid engineering experience and in some cases extended the state of the art to allow the video service to scale with the growth in popularity of the YouTube.