Ask HN: What is a big scale system?

3 pointssyntex1 comment

300k orders a month Is in already a big scale system? If we define that large scale system requires many servers is it possible to handle such amount on single server, and all others solutions which require 10-20 servers on AWS are over over engineered.

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300K orders a month is approximately 10K orders a day, or 400 transactions per hour. Of course, you'd get more at peak times, but that still seems like it could be handled on a single server. You might want to have two servers for increased availability (e.g., servers in different regions, in case there's an outage), but having 10-20 servers means that each of your servers will be idle almost 100% of the time.

If your business has strange order patterns, e.g., 90% of the orders arrive the week before Christmas, then the analysis would be different.

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