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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

"How to scale: Make it somebody else's problem."

A surprisingly legitimate solution.

Yes, with the caveat that you may have to check that they're actually capable of handling the load and you don't get a surprise notice that "uh we can't do this, you're on your own".

I am pretty confident that YouTube will be able to scale to handle any increased load coming from my service.

But they might not at any time, at least without charging. With an apparent internal push for some services to become self-sustaining (see Google Maps API, Recaptcha), YouTube embeds might be next.

It seems unlikely Khan Academy doesn't have the technical competency to deploy their video content to an alternate host rapidly, whether that be an object store (Backblaze) or dedicated servers with very cheap bandwidth (Hetzner, OVH, and similar), perhaps even using PeerTube.

There's a reason other non profits like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive run their own hardware, networking, and connectivity to transit providers. And before the "doing that is expensive!" argument comes up, note how expensive having someone else do these things are. Lots of margin built into cloud services.

I am loosely involved with one of the language teams. This language team, and others like it, are groups of volunteers and not Kahn Academy employees. I don't have all the details but I know that the teams are responsible for creating the content and uploading the content to youtube. Changing to an alternate host would require more coordination than you might think.

My contribution is that I am helping with automating video uploads to the team youtube channel, which is allowed to have "Kahn Academy {language}" branding.

Shameless plug: If any google or youtube employees can help me raise our API quota please get in touch!!! :)

Khan Academy today supports serving video outside of YouTube, which is blocked in some schools. We could essentially flip a switch to not use YouTube, but the cost would be substantial because those videos go Fastly->S3, so anything not in cache is going to result in S3 egress charges.

Something to consider in your tooling for this is to target Backblaze's B2 object store, which supports an S3 compatibility layer [1] (so you shouldn't need to change too much code). I'm unsure if Fastly supports B2 in this configuration yet though.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23069114

Yeah, I'm sure that if we needed to serve more videos through our "fallback player", we'd investigate more cost effective ways to run it. With thousands of videos, it'd be a pain to move … but at least that would be a one time pain!

Something else that can also help cost and quality is EasyBroadcast’s viewer assisted streaming in addition to Fastly. Adding a JS to the player pages enables cdn offloading by making each viewer act as a potential source based on QoE/QoS metrics. Disclaimer: I am one of the cofounders. Happy to help.

They can. Doesn't mean they will.

Or a bill, please pay one million.

Kthxby

"And give them bookoo $$$ to do so."

Which is usually known in the industry as "good problems to have." If you're staring down a huge bill because your company is blowing up you pay it, throw a party, and then figure out how to reduce costs once the hangover wears off.

I'd rename it to "pay someone else to do it". In the case of YouTube, even if the hosting is free, YT still makes a profit (ads, tracking, etc.) so it's a win-win for all.

Or, to phrase it differently: their technical problem, your financial problem.

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