> Who is handling a tens of millions of requests per second?
Speaking as someone less than one order of magnitude below that, it takes us about ~100-200 cores. (Depending on how you amortize shared infrastructure like our Kafka brokers, etc.) So even 10x'ing our infrastructure I can't imagine 50k servers.
It's very reminiscent of that feeling when you were a child that adults have everything figured out, and so you're in a big hurry to get there because then everything will make sense.
Then that moment of dawning horror when you see that nobody knows what the fuck they're doing and everyone is faking it at best, and just a child playing dress-up at worst.
Google has certainly figured out a number of things, but anyone using 2.5 million servers in 2016 on a planet of only 7 billion people is playing dress-up.
I’d assume 2.5M refers to the number of containers, not physical machines. And that since containers are virtualised and largely a developer convenience, there’s not a big reason to try keeping that number low.
My current project is doing 5x the traffic but with 20x the cores, it’s embarrassing. And that’s just counting “our” servers, which are only about 1/3 of the whole enterprise (heading toward 50% if I wasn’t on the scene). I look at all the waste in our project and then I think about why I would ever need 50k cores, let alone servers and I just can’t fathom it. Who is handling a tens of millions of requests per second? And what on earth are you fucking up so badly that you need 2 million servers? Is Google doing 4 billion requests per second?
At some point I have to ask myself if making it easy to manage more servers was really their best strategy. Often friction and constraints are where innovation comes from. When things are easy people don’t think about them until they are gone.