I work at MindGeek, depending on the time of the year it would be fair to say we rank within the top 25 bandwidth users in the world. We are not even close to that amount of servers and we deal with some of the largest traffic in the world. What company is running in 70+ datacenters!? World's largest VPN provider? Security company providing all the data to the NSA?
Maybe it is just my broad assumptions but I would hope that the major big 10 that come to mind such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc would be able to rebuild their production regions in hours.
I don't work for one of those two, but I do work for a very large CDN.
"I'd have thought I've had heard of them..."
One Wiki search later... yup. I've heard of them.
People running edge networks and therefore need servers local to everywhere in the world to keep latencies down. Maybe it's not as much of an issue for MindGeek (the parent company for a lot of video streaming sites). I would guess you guys need a lot of throughput but latency isn't so much of a problem. Or you simply don't need to serve some parts of the world where it might be illegal to distribute some types of content.
FWIW, Cloudflare has 86 data centers: https://www.cloudflare.com/network-map/
Short version: That's a video streaming websites which is rather simple, yet bandwidth intensive.
Outsourcing the caching and video delivery means MindGeek can do with little servers and a few locations.
Nonetheless the CDN you're outsourcing to does need a lot of servers at many edge locations.
Actually, if we think in terms of "top bandwith users in the world". It's possible that your company is far from being in the list. It's likely dominated by content delivery / ISP / and other providers, most of which are unknown to the public.
I am in distributed systems and try to work exclusively on hard problems. So when I say "simple", that is biased on the high end of the spectrum.
If you go to pornhub.com and looks at "popular keyword", you'll only find thousand or ten thousands videos. In a way, there is not that much content on pornhub.
All major websites have challenge. Pornhub is a single purpose website and a lot of the challenge is in video delivery, which can be outsourced to a CDN nowadays.
"simple" is maybe too strong a word. I am trying to convey the idea that it has limited scope and [some of] the problems it's facing are understood by now and have [decent] solutions.
That's not to say it's easy ;)
Many larger companies can't do this; my company has 70+ datacenters with tens of thousands of servers. We can't re-build our prod infra in minutes or hours. We are still doing devops right :D
Like I said, I know you aren't talking about my situation when you made your statement... I just get frustrated when people act like there are hard and fast rules for everyone.