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When I worked at Google I definitely noticed that YouTube was great at (ab)using untracked or very cheap resources. They definitely get huge benifits of otherwi

When I worked at Google I definitely noticed that YouTube was great at (ab)using untracked or very cheap resources. They definitely get huge benifits of otherwise idle data centers in sleeping regions. As the regular service traffic died off YouTube would put those idle cores to work transcoding video. It is definitely the case that YouTube gets lots of really cheap compute by being part of Google. But that isn't a bad thing, they are making use of an otherwise wasted resource, effectively lowering the cost for products that need daytime capacity to serve humans.

jelling 4y ago
The commentators point was that YouTube may not be as strong of a stand-alone company as the article believes if the COGS is inaccurate because YT gets tons of free resources via Google.
BooneJS 4y ago
“In our case, we developed a custom chip to transcode video, as well as software to coordinate these chips. And we put it all together to form our transcoding special brain – the Video (trans)Coding Unit (VCU). We’ve seen up to 20-33x improvements in compute efficiency compared to our previous optimized system, which was running software on traditional servers.” https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/new-era-video-infrastructure/ https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/new-era-video-infrastruc...
- kevincox 4y ago
  If I had to guess these are used for urgent video transcodes. New uploads to popular channels and on-demand transcoding. I suspect that CPUs are still often used for background batch encoding. But maybe 20x is enough that the power cost of extra CPU usage isn't worth it and they will do it all in hardware.
fisf 4y ago
You are basically making the case for the anti-trust case here. i.e. it is very hard for another company to compete without "free compute".
- sclarisse 4y ago
  Eh. Using spare CPU capacity is not really anticompetitive behavior. That’s just an efficient enterprise. Something like Google favoring YouTube in search and suppressing their competitors would be actual anticompetitive behavior.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  But it's not like there will be a free competitor in any case? The closest might be peertube but that's nowhere near as reliable. Vimeo is paid. None of the other big companies seem willing to subsidize an online video service to the tune of tens of billions per annum.
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    Which, again, makes the anti-trust case stronger. The case being: Google leverages one of their businesses (providing compute) to build an anti-competitive moat around another of their businesses (youtube), and it's so effective that they have driven all competitors out of the market. By nearly any standard, Google's control of YouTube should be a prime anti-trust target.
    - UncleEntity 4y ago
      Being a monopoly isn’t illegal, abusing your monopoly is. And how does “providing compute” even matter, YouTube is just using google servers like every other google service. Not like they’re getting something for free because they’re part of the same company.
    - meragrin_ 4y ago
      > Google leverages one of their businesses (providing compute) to build an anti-competitive moat around another of their businesses (youtube), You speak as if providing compute is their primary business. Youtube, existed long before their compute. They already had all their own compute. They only got into providing compute because they figured they could beat AWS with their own infrastructure.
- 4y ago
sebzim4500 4y ago
If they spun out Youtube, then Google could sell access to idle data centers. Basically spot instances, or maybe you describe some task (with e.g. a docker container) and then GCP runs it at some point in the next 24 hours in some datacenter.
RyJones 4y ago
YouTube also functions as a network offset, no? Egress from YouTube helps balance ingress from everything, which should lead to cheaper network settlement. I worked in WANOPS at Microsoft in the 90s, so my understanding of billing is literally decades old.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  Is there excess ingress in Google’s networks? I might have guessed the opposite.
  - RyJones 4y ago
    If they’re ingesting the web as frequently as my Apache logs say, I would guess the imbalance is high
heavenlyblue 4y ago
> It is definitely the case that YouTube gets lots of really cheap compute by being part of Google. But that isn't a bad thing, they are making use of an otherwise wasted resource, effectively lowering the cost for products that need daytime capacity to serve humans. Google could rent this compute capacity to the masses, allowing for healthier competition.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > Google could rent this compute capacity to the masses, allowing for healthier competition. They could, but no major corporation wants healthier competition. They want no competition whatsoever. So there is no reason at all for Google to do this, and every reason (from their point of view) not to.
ghaff 4y ago
Presumably Google could spin out some of those unused resources with spot pricing but certainly it's easier with their own highly instrumented workloads. So I'm skeptical that anything is actually "free" and, at a minimum, I'm sure has internal transfer pricing that has YouTube paying a reasonable value for the resources it uses. And I would furthermore assume that Alphabet management is satisfied with what YouTube's income statement looks like given those transfer payments.
- kevincox 4y ago
  For sure. It isn't free, they are just making good use of otherwise unused capacity. Much like spot instances can be dramatically cheaper they are using the cheapest available resources. Plus they are happy with being preempted at any time or their work being slowed so they are working with an even tighter contract then GCP Spot Instances which have minimum runtimes and preemption notices. It is hard to decide if this is unfair or not. It is true that Google doesn't offer this exact ability to external customers but most customers wouldn't want this type of very unreliable infrastructure. If there was a market Google or Amazon would likely offer it (basically a super-spot which has less guarantees)
KMag 4y ago
But separating YouTube and GCP into separate companies would presumably cause GCP to expose pricing / scheduling modes that would enable more compute to take advantage of regional downtimes. I'm sure there's plenty of ML training jobs that are just aching for regionally idle compute time.
pradn 4y ago
Why would YouTube not get Borg charge-backs? YouTube does pay for the infra it uses. And it's likely much cheaper than it would be if it were an independent company with its own data centers.

jelling 4y ago

The commentators point was that YouTube may not be as strong of a stand-alone company as the article believes if the COGS is inaccurate because YT gets tons of free resources via Google.

BooneJS 4y ago

“In our case, we developed a custom chip to transcode video, as well as software to coordinate these chips. And we put it all together to form our transcoding special brain – the Video (trans)Coding Unit (VCU). We’ve seen up to 20-33x improvements in compute efficiency compared to our previous optimized system, which was running software on traditional servers.” https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/new-era-video-infrastructure/ https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/new-era-video-infrastruc...

kevincox 4y ago
If I had to guess these are used for urgent video transcodes. New uploads to popular channels and on-demand transcoding. I suspect that CPUs are still often used for background batch encoding. But maybe 20x is enough that the power cost of extra CPU usage isn't worth it and they will do it all in hardware.

fisf 4y ago

You are basically making the case for the anti-trust case here. i.e. it is very hard for another company to compete without "free compute".

sclarisse 4y ago
Eh. Using spare CPU capacity is not really anticompetitive behavior. That’s just an efficient enterprise. Something like Google favoring YouTube in search and suppressing their competitors would be actual anticompetitive behavior.
MichaelZuo 4y ago
But it's not like there will be a free competitor in any case? The closest might be peertube but that's nowhere near as reliable. Vimeo is paid. None of the other big companies seem willing to subsidize an online video service to the tune of tens of billions per annum.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  Which, again, makes the anti-trust case stronger. The case being: Google leverages one of their businesses (providing compute) to build an anti-competitive moat around another of their businesses (youtube), and it's so effective that they have driven all competitors out of the market. By nearly any standard, Google's control of YouTube should be a prime anti-trust target.
  - UncleEntity 4y ago
    Being a monopoly isn’t illegal, abusing your monopoly is. And how does “providing compute” even matter, YouTube is just using google servers like every other google service. Not like they’re getting something for free because they’re part of the same company.
  - meragrin_ 4y ago
    > Google leverages one of their businesses (providing compute) to build an anti-competitive moat around another of their businesses (youtube), You speak as if providing compute is their primary business. Youtube, existed long before their compute. They already had all their own compute. They only got into providing compute because they figured they could beat AWS with their own infrastructure.
4y ago

sebzim4500 4y ago

If they spun out Youtube, then Google could sell access to idle data centers. Basically spot instances, or maybe you describe some task (with e.g. a docker container) and then GCP runs it at some point in the next 24 hours in some datacenter.

RyJones 4y ago

YouTube also functions as a network offset, no? Egress from YouTube helps balance ingress from everything, which should lead to cheaper network settlement. I worked in WANOPS at Microsoft in the 90s, so my understanding of billing is literally decades old.

tshaddox 4y ago
Is there excess ingress in Google’s networks? I might have guessed the opposite.
- RyJones 4y ago
  If they’re ingesting the web as frequently as my Apache logs say, I would guess the imbalance is high

heavenlyblue 4y ago

> It is definitely the case that YouTube gets lots of really cheap compute by being part of Google. But that isn't a bad thing, they are making use of an otherwise wasted resource, effectively lowering the cost for products that need daytime capacity to serve humans. Google could rent this compute capacity to the masses, allowing for healthier competition.

JohnFen 4y ago
> Google could rent this compute capacity to the masses, allowing for healthier competition. They could, but no major corporation wants healthier competition. They want no competition whatsoever. So there is no reason at all for Google to do this, and every reason (from their point of view) not to.

ghaff 4y ago

Presumably Google could spin out some of those unused resources with spot pricing but certainly it's easier with their own highly instrumented workloads. So I'm skeptical that anything is actually "free" and, at a minimum, I'm sure has internal transfer pricing that has YouTube paying a reasonable value for the resources it uses. And I would furthermore assume that Alphabet management is satisfied with what YouTube's income statement looks like given those transfer payments.

kevincox 4y ago
For sure. It isn't free, they are just making good use of otherwise unused capacity. Much like spot instances can be dramatically cheaper they are using the cheapest available resources. Plus they are happy with being preempted at any time or their work being slowed so they are working with an even tighter contract then GCP Spot Instances which have minimum runtimes and preemption notices. It is hard to decide if this is unfair or not. It is true that Google doesn't offer this exact ability to external customers but most customers wouldn't want this type of very unreliable infrastructure. If there was a market Google or Amazon would likely offer it (basically a super-spot which has less guarantees)

KMag 4y ago

But separating YouTube and GCP into separate companies would presumably cause GCP to expose pricing / scheduling modes that would enable more compute to take advantage of regional downtimes. I'm sure there's plenty of ML training jobs that are just aching for regionally idle compute time.

pradn 4y ago

Why would YouTube not get Borg charge-backs? YouTube does pay for the infra it uses. And it's likely much cheaper than it would be if it were an independent company with its own data centers.