Yes, real-world traffic will definitely vary over time. 1,000 rps is significantly beyond the average rps needed for 500,000 requests per day (which works out

Yes, real-world traffic will definitely vary over time. 1,000 rps is significantly beyond the average rps needed for 500,000 requests per day (which works out to an average/sustained ~6 rps). I consider the capacity to handle 1,000 rps well beyond the realm of handling the unpredictable burstiness of a 6 rps sustained load. But just to contribute some anecdotal evidence: I've never observed greater than ~50 rps from the HN #1 position. Real world traffic is not smooth, but it's also not bursty to quite the degree that would be necessary to cause the server to wince. All of this remains predicated on Amazon not throttling the CPU capacity to true zero or something approximating true zero.