Scale calculations

To design a scalable Netflix-like service, it’s crucial to estimate the storage, bandwidth, and processing requirements, based on the expected user base and usage patterns. These estimations will help us determine the necessary infrastructure and resources needed to support the service. Let’s perform some capacity estimation and scaling calculations by making some basic assumptions.

Here are some of the assumptions we will make while designing our Netflix-like service.

Assumptions

• The total number of users: 50 million
• The average number of active users per day: 10 million
• The average number of videos watched per user per day: 3
• The average video duration: 1.5 hours
• The average video file size (HD quality): 3 GB

Next, based on these assumptions, let’s estimate the storage for our service

Storage estimation

Storage will typically include both data and metadata storage. In our case, we have videos, thumbnails...