[jolynch]

My experience has been that the talent density is the main difference. Netflix tackles huge problems with a small number of engineers. I think one angle of complexity you may be missing is efficiency - both in engineering cost and infrastructure cost.

Also YouTube has _excellent_ engineering (e.g. Vitess in the data space), and they are building atop an excellent infrastructure (e.g. Borg and the godly Google network). It's worth noting though that the whole Netflix infrastructure team is probably smaller than a small to medium satellite org at Google.

[SR2Z]

YouTube hasn't used Vitess for a few years - they've moved into Spanner almost entirely.

Otherwise I agree with you.

[jolynch]

That's good to know - Spanner is even more impressive engineering!

I wish we had the staff and time to build and maintain something like Spanner. Different constraints lead to different solutions.

[pjmlp]

So basically, out of Go, into C++.

One of the conference demos on how Go is used internally is now gone.