The author also failed to notice "peaks" from the original spotify blog post about events per second. So 700k requests is not average, it's peak. They don't have that every second.
> Currently our production load peaks at around 700K events per second. To account for the future growth and possible disaster recovery scenarios, we settled on a test load of 2M events per second.
In the absence of any other numbers, using the 700k number seems reasonable otherwise you would start to get into modelling without any real data to back up your assumptions. This at least gives you a maximum they would be paying under current production conditions.
Thanks for the great articles David, keep them coming! :)
Assuming max as the norm is not too right. (just to make the number look high)
Having run global services myself I can tell you that the shape is usually no standard distribution. Peak/trough depends on the exact usage demographics, but the one I have on hand has a trough of ~1/2 peak, and an average of ~3/4.
It's really not fair to tell the world that their costs are based on average of 700k rps, when that is their peak traffic through the system.
If you want to further refine you could probably estimate a large chunk of early morning US/EU time where traffic will be very light. maybe reduce the estimate by 1/3 or 1/4th to account for this.