User registration and authentication Video upload, storage, and playback Video search and discovery Video commenting and rating Channel creation and management Advertising support Reporting and analytics
High availability and scalability to handle millions of users and videos Low latency for video playback and interactions High video and audio quality Security for user data and video content Support for a wide range of video formats Compliance with copyright laws
User profile and channel customization Playlists and video recommendations Subscription and notification features Video editing and transcoding tools Live streaming support Monetization options for creators Multi-language support Back of envelope estimation: A rough estimate for building a basic version of YouTube would be a team of around 20-30 software engineers working for about a year. However, a full-featured version of YouTube would likely require a much larger team and more time.
The data model for YouTube would include entities such as users, videos, channels, comments, and ratings. These entities would be related to each other through relationships like uploader, subscriber, and comments.
YouTube's API would offer endpoints for user registration and authentication, video upload, video playback, channel management, and other features. The API would be designed to be RESTful and to return data in JSON format.
The high level architecture of YouTube system would consist of following components:
Frontend: Consists of various web pages, where user interacts with the system. Backend: Consist of various services like User Service, Video Service, Comment Service, and Advertising Service, etc. Database: Store all the meta-data and content of the videos. Caching: used to store frequently access data to improve the read performance. Content delivery network (CDN): used to distribute the video content to different geographic regions. Storage: used to store the videos, images, and other static files. Load balancer: used to distribute the traffic across multiple servers.
- User should upload a video
- User should access analytics (Views, Likes, Comments)
- User should access a feed (based on recent, followed, recent search, recent watched)
- User should update administrative settings (Video settings, Account settings)
- User should watch videos in different encoding formats
- User should follow channels
- Scalability
- Availability Fault Tolerance
- Performance