How Google Photos scales to store 4 trillion photos and videos

Google engineering managers Dave and Tracy describe Google Photos' 2023 storage and serving architecture, separating encrypted media blobs, Spanner metadata, and asynchronous ML processing.

Key Points Covered

• Backup stores media and metadata separately, then starts asynchronous search and organization processing. [00:01:04]-[00:03:11]
• Tracy describes sharding interactive reads and writes away from ML and batch work, plus slow rollouts for reliability. [00:03:11]-[00:05:20]
• Dave and Tracy attribute reduced development and SRE work to Spanner's managed operations. [00:10:33]-[00:12:41]
• Dave reports the user, image, query, and growth figures as point-in-time Google Photos scale claims. [00:11:37]-[00:13:43]
• This 2023 vendor case is not a reusable reference design; confirm current documentation and test the workload, security, privacy, residency, and regulatory requirements independently.

Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGUOGr37Yg4(opens in a new tab)