Re:Serving Netflix Video Traffic at 800Gb/s and Beyond [pdf]
by bombcar on Friday August 19, 2022 @11:07AM
(#32521934)
Video calling is "easier" in that the p2p option is workable for some variant of "Works".
It is much much harder because you can't do the "cache everything on the edge" solution. If storage was infinitely cheap and small, Netflix could run their entire business by sending a USB stick with every single movie/tv show they have on it encrypted to you, and everything would play locally. This is basically what they do with their edge servers/CDNs.
You can't do that with video calls, because the video/audio didn't exist 1 millisecond ago.
Re:Serving Netflix Video Traffic at 800Gb/s and Beyond [pdf]
by eru on Friday August 19, 2022 @10:57AM
(#32521801)
Yeah, jon-wood really did a great write-up of the challenges involved.
In any case, it's hard to say what the 'greatest' engineering challenge is. You can make almost any kind of engineering really challenging, if you (or the market..) sets yourself a very low cost-ceiling.
My point was intended to be that there's the same challenges and more - but it's not something I've thought about in depth (and certainly not had to work with), it maybe wasn't a very good characterisation because it's not the same on the other side either, no large file to serve because at the start of the call it doesn't exist yet for example, so perhaps I take it back.