Ask HN: How are Google and Amazon handling all the new devices today?

2 pointsethanpil2 comments

Presumably, Google and Amazon have sold millions of new Homes and Alexas in recent weeks, many of which will be powering on today and hammering their networks and APIs. I'm wondering has anyone ever been part of a large scale roll out like this? How are they handling this? Are key engineers loosing their x-mas day break and coming into the office monitor and maintain the infrastructure?

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That kind of service is easy to scale by putting different devices (eg. the echo dot that is next to me now) in different shards.

Also both Google and Amazon have elastic capabilities, they can move machines from one task to another, today is the slowest day of the year for internet traffic so probably AWS customers are using very little, also search and e-commerce traffic is light so capacity is not a problem.

The infrastructure was already in place. Google already has a billion and a half Android devices hammering their infrastructure already, whats a hundred million more? Amazon has enough infrastructure to power themselves plus hundreds of thousands of other companies who host on AWS.

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