Requirements of YouTube's Design

Requirements

Let’s start with the requirements for designing a system like YouTube.

Functional requirements

We require that our system is able to perform the following functions:

1. Stream videos

2. Upload videos

3. Search videos according to titles

4. Like and dislike videos

5. Add comments to videos

6. View thumbnails

Non-functional requirements

It’s important that our system also meets the following requirements:

• High availability: The system should be highly available. High availability requires a good percentage of uptime. Generally, an uptime of 99% and above is considered good.

• Scalability: As the number of users grows, these issues should not become bottlenecks: storage for uploading content, the bandwidth required for simultaneous viewing, and the number of concurrent user requests should not overwhelm our application/web server.

• Good performance: A smooth streaming experience leads to better performance overall.

• Reliability: Content uploaded to the system should not be lost or damaged.