How much storage data will YouTube need for the next year?

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How much storage data will YouTube need for the next year?

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Santhosh Kumar · Answer 1 · 2021-11-24T05:04:22+0000

Approach:

1. Understand the prompt better

2. Map out the calculation steps

3. Sensecheck the results

Clarification questions

Candidate: are we looking at just US or WW for the analysis?

Interviewer: WW

Candidate: do we delete the older data or store forever?

Interviewer: Store forever

Candidate: do we measure only video format or all format (video, pictures, etc) ?

Interviewer: All

Candidate: how many copies are store?

Interviewer: 5

Calculation steps:

1. Estimate the number of global population- 7B

2. Estimate the number of people with internet access- (50% of world population) 3.5B

3. Estimate the number of people that use you tube- (60% of internet users)- 2B

4. Estimate the number of people that create content- (1% of the youtube users based on data from my family and friends circle)- 20MM

5. Estimate the number of videos uploaded per yaer- (let us assume youtubers create one video every two weeks, that is 26 videos in a year)- 20*26MM= 520MM videos per year

6. Estimate the storage per video and then total storage space for copy - (let us assume storage per video is 100 MB) - 520MM videos * 500 MB= 520,000,000 * 500 MB or 520, 000 GB * 500 or 520 TB * 500 or 0.52 *500 PB or 25 PB

7. Estimate the total storage space for five copies- 25*5 = 100 PB

Ginni Kakkar · Answer 2 · 2021-11-01T02:36:04+0000

500 hours of video content is being uploaded to YouTube every minute globally

# hours content per day = 500*60*24= 720k hours/day

Videos are stores in resolutions: 1080, 720, 480, 360, 240, 144

Assuming total size for all the formats for a 1-minute video = 60MB

Total storage for 1 hour video = 60*60 = 3600MB = 3.6GB

# Storage for per day content = 720k * 3.6 = 2592,000 GB = 2592 TB=2.6 PB

# storage for an year = 2.6*365 = 949 PB

This is only on a single server. YouTube would be maintaining multiple copies of the same content, so multiply this final number by the number of servers we are saving it in. This will give us the total storage needed.