Tackling Scalability Issues

If you a techie kind of person and if you have ever had ambitions to build a large-scale website, you have thought to yourself “how can I make this scale really big?”

Well, the guys at YouTube have been through the drill. Here is a great video by Cuong Do, one of the founders of YouTube and the guy in charge of making YouTube scale, about how they managed to scale YouTube.

Yeah, there are some architectural decisions you can make up-front that will make scaling a website easier, but, after watching this video about the scalability challenges YouTube faced, I realized that:

1. Scalability is all about managing bottlenecks. You watch for them forming, you deal with them before they become a problem.
2. Improving performance in parts of the system that are not bottlenecks does very little good.
3. The problems you get are almost never the problems you plan for.
4. Plan, but don’t over plan. See what happens and adapt.

I have become a huge fan of the Google Tech Talk videos and tech videos in general on Google Video and YouTube. I have started to download them and load them on to my iPhone (how to do that is a future blog post itself) and I find myself watching them whenever I am in the subway, in a taxi or have a few minutes to kill. They are a great way to get a healthy dose of new knowledge fast and if you have them on the iPhone, you can get that dose in those random periods of downtime that would otherwise be wasted time.