In our previous posts, we've discussed systems architecture and design patterns. Let's put it all together and create a basic design of YouTube.
Here's a simplified design for a YouTube-like service using a Monolithic+Microservices architecture, implemented with Laravel other technologies.
Laravel Application (Monolith): Your Laravel application will serve as the main monolith. It'll contain the majority of the business logic, such as user registration and authentication, video uploading and processing, comment handling, likes and dislikes, playlists, and so on. It'll also handle rendering views and interfacing with the user. It follows the MVC design pattern, with Models handling data and business logic, Views rendering the user interface, and Controllers handling user requests and tying the Models and Views together.
MariaDB: This would be used for general data persistence needs of your application, storing structured data like user details, video metadata, comments, likes, and other relational data. Laravel's Eloquent ORM would interface with MariaDB to handle data persistence and retrieval.
Meilisearch (Microservice): This would be used for full text indexing and search. When a new video is added or updated in your application, its data would be sent to Meilisearch for indexing. The Laravel application can then query the Meilisearch service when a user makes a search, returning relevant results quickly.
Redis (Microservice): This would be used for in-memory caching to improve performance. Frequently accessed data, such as popular videos or frequently searched terms, can be stored in Redis to reduce load on MariaDB and improve response times. Redis could also be used for session storage and rate limiting.
Local and S3-Compatible Object Storage: When a user uploads a video, it can initially be stored in local storage. Then, a background job can be dispatched to process the video (like transcoding it into different resolutions) and then move it to an S3-compatible object storage, updating the video's metadata in MariaDB with the new storage location. The object storage can handle serving the video files to users, offloading that work from the Laravel application.
Other Considerations: You might consider breaking out other parts of the application into microservices if they can scale better or need to be updated more frequently than the rest of the application. For example, a separate microservice could handle video processing, or another could handle sending notifications to users. You could also consider adding a queue system like Laravel's built-in queue service or RabbitMQ to handle background jobs and improve performance.
Remember, this is a highly simplified design and a real-world YouTube-like service would require many more considerations, like handling high levels of traffic, video streaming, content delivery networks (CDN), security, monitoring, content moderation, and so on.
Also, while Laravel and the chosen technologies can certainly handle a project like this, the Monolithic+Microservices architecture and the specific technologies should be chosen based on the exact needs and constraints of the project.
