Early YouTube Engineer Tells All

Liz Gannes, Friday, July 11, 2008 at 1:30 PM PT Comments (19)

When we recently heard about the history of YouTube’s growth strategy from CEO Chad Hurley’s point of view, he described it as “hanging onto a rocket.” But an engineer’s take is always going to be a bit less rose-colored and a bit more about the terrifying situations you brained your way out of. So we were particularly interested to tune in to a talk at YouTube’s developer conference Thursday by Cuong Do, an early software engineer who’s now manager of the site’s Core Product Engineering group.

Do’s talk was titled “Behind the Scenes: A Look Into YouTube’s Infrastructure,” and he didn’t disappoint, with harrowing tales of outages; gory details about the specific languages, architectures, and tools YouTube uses; and a flow-chart level view on the way the site handles uploads and video delivery while undergoing the massive usage it sees on a daily basis.

“One of the key phrases we had in the early days was ‘These are good problems to have,’” Do said. “And after a while we’re like, ‘I’m going to kill the next person who says that.’”

YouTube promised it would post video from the talk on its site eventually, but I don’t see it there yet, so check out the version from my handheld camera.

5 trackbacks so far

July 12th, 2008
2:42 PM PT

A Look into YouTube’s Architecture said:

[...] Youtube engineer Cuong Do explains that and more in Behind the Scenes: A Look into YouTube’s Architecture. Enjoy his horror stories from the early days. Tags: Cuong Do, YouTubeShare This Related [...]

July 14th, 2008
1:17 AM PT

jimprince.co.uk » Blog Archive » Behind the Scenes: A Look Into YouTube’s Infrastructure said:

[...] An early YouTube engineer tells all at the YouTube developer conference on July 10, 2008. Interesting stuff. Be warned it’s taken from a handheld camera so the quality isn’t great. more info here. [...]

July 14th, 2008
3:49 AM PT

a peek on youtube’s infrastructure « C S Shyam Sundar’s Thoughtpad said:

[...] has an article, where Cuong Do an early engineer of the site’s Core Product Engineering group tells all about [...]

July 14th, 2008
8:12 AM PT

Some interesting reading | StartupDunia focuses on Indian startups, Web 2.0, Indian Internet industry and entrepreneurship in India said:

[...] via GigaOM [...]

July 14th, 2008
8:28 AM PT

Marc’s Voice » Blog Archive » It's mid-summer blogging time said:

[...] The early days at YouTube - while J.D. Lasica was calling us up, treating us like employees (we build ourmedia.org - for free - and were never even thanked for it), they were rocking at YouTube - getting paid. [...]

14 comments so far

July 11th, 2008
2:06 PM PT

slacy said:

I believe this is the same as this video:

(link)

July 11th, 2008
3:55 PM PT

Liz Gannes said:

That’s actually a different talk by the same guy, but cool!

July 11th, 2008
5:22 PM PT

Shiva said:

Thanks for the video. If you get news on the youtube version(more clarity), please let us know.

July 12th, 2008
12:54 PM PT

Nag said:

Nice video.. very nice to know what is youtube running on ..

Cheers, Nag

July 12th, 2008
11:09 PM PT

Will said:

I love GigaOm and the scope of the reporting, but you guys suck at video.

Perhaps you could invest in a shotgun mic that picks up distant audio more clearly; a portable monopod that steadies the shot; and sit far enough back so that we can see the entire screen.

Don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate being able to see the video, but you need to improve your technique, otherwise instead of being a ‘value-added resource’, it becomes an annoyance.

Thanks.

PS
Anyone know if Scribd or anyone else has a copy of his PPT?

July 13th, 2008
7:32 AM PT

John Thomas said:

Wow that is pretty amazing. Cool stuff to know.

July 13th, 2008
8:54 AM PT

anon said:

I enjoyed how he can’t pronounce MySQL lol.

July 13th, 2008
10:47 AM PT

Andras Vass said:

Cuong Do Cuong had already had an excellent presentation about the YouTube architecture at the Seattle Conference on Scalability last year.
A Google video of the presentation can be found here:
(link)

July 13th, 2008
5:46 PM PT

resprungresprung said:

Well worth watching.
For all the right reasons, YouTube launched on with solid, configurable open source components:
Apache / Lighttpd
MySql
Python

…until user demand crushed them, and they had to move to Google distribution tech such as bigtable, and database shards.

An articulate alpha geek with terrible jokes :-)

July 13th, 2008
6:08 PM PT

JMJimmy said:

Very interesting talk.

@anon

That’s how it’s pronounced in the business/tech world.

July 13th, 2008
11:21 PM PT

Mukul Kumar said:

Really good video. I posted a transcript at (link)

Thanks,
Mukul.

July 14th, 2008
10:04 AM PT

Hey Will, you’re right about sucking at video. I was just psyched to be present for the talk and figured more people would want to see it too so I pulled out the camera in my purse. But I promise we will get better in the future!

July 14th, 2008
6:06 PM PT

Hey Liz,

Thanks for the note back. We all learn as we go, so it’s something that, with more advanced planning, can only get better for events like this that we all appreciate having the GigaOm team be our ‘fly on the wall’ for.

July 14th, 2008
6:12 PM PT

PS,

Thanks to Mukul for going to the trouble of posting a transcript for everyone. That’s what makes GigaOm’s community of users/readers a nice ‘family’ to be a part of.

GigaOM