I miss High Scalability

Back in, I want to say 2016? I got so much education from reading High Scalability as we worked to scale #Ada. Thankfully, the new owner of the domain and content Alex Xu is awesome too (check out the ByteByteGo newsletter), but I miss the look and feel and the less polished posts of the High Scalability of yore. My favourite post was the deep dive on how Netflix works1. This bit on the transcoding blew me away:

For The Crown, Netflix stores around 1,200 files!

Stranger Things season 2 has even more files. It was shot in 8K and has nine episodes. The source video files were many, many terabytes of data. It took 190,000 CPU hours to encode just one season.

The result? 9,570 different video, audio, and text files!


  1. What Happens When You Press Play