You understand it if you think of engineering infinites rather than mathematical infinites. The capacity of a full single datacenter can be treated as infinite for most customers. I explained how its defined in the original comment. Amount of places in engineering where you treat even a 3 order of magnitude difference as infinite is a lot, but the number of order of magnitudes varies depending on context.
Re:The August 17 outage, and the work ahead
by inigyou on Friday August 21, 2026 @08:17AM
(#49386970)
Maybe if you're the only customer, but it seems you've not yet gotten a "no capacity" error from AWS, which happens sometimes.
Re:The August 17 outage, and the work ahead
by darkwater on Friday August 21, 2026 @08:22AM
(#49387015)
You don't have a single Google datacenter (or any other provider / big name) for a single tenant. The bigger the DC, the more the number of tenants/customers reaches "infinity" (giving the same meaning to "infinity" you are giving to it)
Re:The August 17 outage, and the work ahead
by aoeusnth1 on Friday August 21, 2026 @02:38PM
(#49392215)
No customer has access to an appreciable fraction of any data center, and if they do they don't have 10x overhead in reserved quota.
Re:The August 17 outage, and the work ahead
by Brian_K_White on Friday August 21, 2026 @04:45AM
(#49385460)
It is infinitely larger, because there is no distinction between more than you use, and infinity.
Re:The August 17 outage, and the work ahead
by catlifeonmars on Friday August 21, 2026 @05:16AM
(#49385669)
Sure there is infinite capacity given an infinite amount of time to scale up. I assert you’re leaving out the time dimension. Those so-called infinities are simply not accessible in a practical way since you’ll hit a wall in actually provisioning that capacity long before the data center runs out of compute.
And of course, load shedding low priority traffic is still a partial outage, it's just a less bad outage than load shedding high priority traffic. It does not fix lack of capacity, but it significantly lessens the negative effects of it.