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> Today, more than 4 trillion photos are stored in Google Photos, and every week 28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded. I found this snippet pretty ama

> Today, more than 4 trillion photos are stored in Google Photos, and every week 28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded. I found this snippet pretty amazing to think about, it's a scale I've never operated at or planned for. And probably most of us never will. I wonder what kind of infrastructure, software, bandwidth, and cost considerations (aside from this blog post) they have to contend with.

treis 6y ago
>28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded. If I've done my math right that's something like 3-4,000 hard drives per week assuming 10mb per file and 10tb per hard drive.
- kajecounterhack 6y ago
  (*3 because Google can't lose your data and stores multiple copies, /x because neural compression)
- anuila 6y ago
  10mb per file only if you average videos, multiple sizes/formats and assume some redundancy. The single photo file stored by Google averages 2 megabytes.
- martimarkov 6y ago
  They also have data deduplication. I’d guess at a block level so it would be less than that
jl6 6y ago
For context, if you assigned each photo a unique integer ID, the list of IDs (just the list of numbers, not the data itself, not even any other metadata) wouldn’t fit on the largest HDD available today.
smueller1234 6y ago
For what it's worth, this (sort of thing) was one of the reasons why I joined Google. And lo and behold I do in storage infrastructure now. :) (Alas, I am not at liberty to speak for the company or share any numbers.) I appreciate that working for Google isn't everyone's cup of tea for a myriad of reasons, and would never pretend otherwise. And yes, the interview process can be onerous. But we are hiring! Certainly the 'technical scale' bit didn't disappoint me. As with any other big company, if you're wondering how it is to work there, I would strongly recommend looking up acquaintances in the company and getting an inside view of the workplace dynamics to get a sense of what would await you and whether you'd enjoy it, even if experiences across this large an organization will vary greatly. If they're not close personal friends chances are if you just know them casually, they would still be happy enough to give you an unfiltered and honest summary of their experience.

treis 6y ago

>28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded. If I've done my math right that's something like 3-4,000 hard drives per week assuming 10mb per file and 10tb per hard drive.

kajecounterhack 6y ago
(*3 because Google can't lose your data and stores multiple copies, /x because neural compression)
anuila 6y ago
10mb per file only if you average videos, multiple sizes/formats and assume some redundancy. The single photo file stored by Google averages 2 megabytes.
martimarkov 6y ago
They also have data deduplication. I’d guess at a block level so it would be less than that

jl6 6y ago

For context, if you assigned each photo a unique integer ID, the list of IDs (just the list of numbers, not the data itself, not even any other metadata) wouldn’t fit on the largest HDD available today.

smueller1234 6y ago

For what it's worth, this (sort of thing) was one of the reasons why I joined Google. And lo and behold I do in storage infrastructure now. :) (Alas, I am not at liberty to speak for the company or share any numbers.) I appreciate that working for Google isn't everyone's cup of tea for a myriad of reasons, and would never pretend otherwise. And yes, the interview process can be onerous. But we are hiring! Certainly the 'technical scale' bit didn't disappoint me. As with any other big company, if you're wondering how it is to work there, I would strongly recommend looking up acquaintances in the company and getting an inside view of the workplace dynamics to get a sense of what would await you and whether you'd enjoy it, even if experiences across this large an organization will vary greatly. If they're not close personal friends chances are if you just know them casually, they would still be happy enough to give you an unfiltered and honest summary of their experience.