Quora and YouTube have similar use cases like comments, replies, counters, etc. However, in the design part of Quora, it was described the router, the tasks, and the tasks queue. But what about YouTube, why was the design of YouTube lacking a description of tasks and a routing system? What is the difference and when is it preferable to talk about jobs and their queues on high-level design? I am pretty sure that YouTube heavy relies on tasks and queues and routing and etc.
Course: Grokking Modern System Design Interview for Engineers & Managers - Learn Interactively
Lesson: Initial Design of Quora
Hi Pavel
YouTube is a streaming service whereas Quora is a Q/A platform. Therefore, the designs will also be significantly different. We, as designers, focus on the details limited to the key features that will meet the functional and nonfunctional requirements. Realistically, there will definitely be queueing mechanisms within each large-scale distributed system. These queueing and routing mechanisms will vary depending upon the type of requests from users and of course the features offered by the application. Intuitively, it makes sense to have queueing mechanisms because there will be a number of different tasks with varying priority levels in Quora.
In YouTube, however, our focus will be on the key problems, which are streaming efficiently, reducing the storage needs, and encoding/transcoding techniques, etc. The nature of a design problem allows us to focus on different aspects of the design. We chose different design problems to focus on a different set of problems so that our learners benefit from them.
Happy learning!
Thank you