I have always wondered how do they deliver their content and what goes on behind the scenes and nobody on tech twitter or even youtubers talk about pornhub's infra for some reason. A lot of the innovation in tech has roots in people wanting to see high quality tiddies on the internet.

* The frontend itself runs on bare metal

* A lot of the backend was built out as microservices, running on top of Mesos and then later K8s

* CDN was in-house. The long tail is surprisingly long, but the front page videos were cached globally

The unifying theme behind PH is that they host everything on their own equipment, no AWS/GCP involved.