YouTube API Design Decisions

The API design for a streaming service is an intricate operation due to the complex nature of the system. It involves significant technical aspects—for example, the API architecture style to use between different interacting entities and the protocols adopted for transferring streaming data. In the following section, we’ll decide on the primary design considerations that we’ll stick to in designing an API for the YouTube streaming service.

Design overview

The following illustrations show a bird's eye view of YouTube's primary services, which consist of streaming, uploading, searching, commenting, and rating (liking or disliking) services. The upload service is used to upload the video contents to the blob storage and relevant metadata to the metadata database. The search service efficiently finds relevant videos from the vast database of videos. Similarly, the comment service enables users to post comments on a video, and these can be rated via the rating service.