Youtube would be a prime example: I’m guessing the storage required for the metadata of all videos is too large to be stored on a single server, so how do they achieve millisecond-level performance on searches and handle millions of queries routinely?
What kind of infrastructure and technology is required for this?
Do you have any resources I could use to learn more on this subject?
Often it’s distributed databases like Google spanner, amazon aurora, cockroach db, etc. Google has a public whitepaper on spanner you can read.
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/spanner-osdi2012.pdf