I know that I can upload videos to YouTube, constantly, but I’m curious, how does YouTube store all the videos? Like where are they all held?
In: Technology
It depends on what level of abstraction you’re talking at.
At the physical level, videos are stored all over the place, split between and replicated across many and magnetic hard disk drives and solid state flash drives spread across the planet in data centers.
There are many layers of abstraction for storage above that though. No one at YouTube is addressing speicific inodes of specific disks on specific machines when it comes to video storage.
Rather YouTube uses an internal distributed blobstore similar to [Google Cloud Storage](https://cloud.google.com/storage) or Amazon S3. This blobstore is built on various other storage primitives / abstractions. One abstraction or layer is called [Colossus](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer/a-peek-behind-colossus-googles-file-system), Google’s cluster-level filesystem.
Ultimately, YouTube stores its videos in a blobstore, but that blobstore is an abstraction which is really storing data using other lower level services which ultimately end up storing bytes on physical disks.
However, when *you* receive a YouTube video, you’re not getting the same video that’s stored there. You interact with YouTube through a content delivery network, which will replicate and cache content close to the edge, which has its own storage strategies for that.
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