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> I would love to know what software stack, hardware, and uplink connections in total they utilize to accomplish a real-world 80k request per second throughput.

> I would love to know what software stack, hardware, and uplink connections in total they utilize to accomplish a real-world 80k request per second throughput. How many instances do you guys think Amazon runs for its primary e-commerce front-end stack? In total, and per region? Assuming they have a multi-region rollout. > But I never see anyone talk about real-world numbers. Just synthetic poopoo. The number probably changes all the time based on load. They'll never release these details because it's a competitive advantage to have the "how popular are they in $place at $time-of-day" data private. When they do share numbers, it'll always be the most flattering and devoid of any context beyond the "wow" factor.

andrewmcwatters 3y ago
I'm not sure it's the biggest deal in the world, plus real-world market presence data is regularly detailed in shareholder reports for various companies. You could take low-end instance specifications and standard industry stacks and extrapolate forward how many instances they might need to maintain at a maximum, but those numbers are going to be off. Are they running 400 low-end front-end instances across the globe? Probably, (plus the 40 or so other services they claim to need, multiplied by region count at a minimum) and that would actually be well below realistic and reasonable for a company like Amazon. You can take a bunch of regional instances that handle roughly 200 req/s and make that work.
tacozilla 3y ago
While I can understand the cynicism, the real answer is a lot closer to something much more boring, which is most people just don't care about the actual numbers, and if they were to release them, while interesting to a small few, generally no one would actually care. There's also a common misnomer that Amazon.com is somehow just this one giant app running on a set of servers, which isn't remotely how it's actually deployed, and that's before we spend time arguing whether a team's instances even count as "primary e-commerce front-end stack" or not. :P
- hughesjj 3y ago
  Also their "stack" includes various degrees of AWS (maws, naws, and I'm sure a bunch of snowflake situations innumerable here, I mean do you count corpinfra? Controls?) Not to mention all the data center logistics

andrewmcwatters 3y ago

I'm not sure it's the biggest deal in the world, plus real-world market presence data is regularly detailed in shareholder reports for various companies. You could take low-end instance specifications and standard industry stacks and extrapolate forward how many instances they might need to maintain at a maximum, but those numbers are going to be off. Are they running 400 low-end front-end instances across the globe? Probably, (plus the 40 or so other services they claim to need, multiplied by region count at a minimum) and that would actually be well below realistic and reasonable for a company like Amazon. You can take a bunch of regional instances that handle roughly 200 req/s and make that work.

tacozilla 3y ago

While I can understand the cynicism, the real answer is a lot closer to something much more boring, which is most people just don't care about the actual numbers, and if they were to release them, while interesting to a small few, generally no one would actually care. There's also a common misnomer that Amazon.com is somehow just this one giant app running on a set of servers, which isn't remotely how it's actually deployed, and that's before we spend time arguing whether a team's instances even count as "primary e-commerce front-end stack" or not. :P

hughesjj 3y ago
Also their "stack" includes various degrees of AWS (maws, naws, and I'm sure a bunch of snowflake situations innumerable here, I mean do you count corpinfra? Controls?) Not to mention all the data center logistics