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Comment by the-rc | Hacker News Reader

"This caching, along with aggressive pooling of read requests, allows Zanzibar to issue only 20 million read RPCs per second to Spanner." ("Only")

I'm surprised by all the numbers they give out: latency, regions, operation counts, even servers. The typical Google paper omits numbers on the Y axis of its most interesting graphs. Or it says "more than a billion", which makes people think "2B", when the actual number might be closer to 10B or even higher.

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Kind of needed in the cloud war where many actually question if the mysterious Google supermacy in global infrastructure is really true.

Throwing servers at the problem is less impressive then thinking very hard and solving it with less.

there's physical limit as what algorithms and tricks can do. Their numbers are incredible though.

And there's much new fun to be had when you have this many servers around. For example - once you start shuffling around tens of petabytes a day you quickly notice that bit flips are very real. Computers do what we tell them to do with incredibly high probability, but it is always below 1.

Which is exactly my point: no one cares about the absolute number each cloud has. They care about the capacities.

If your conclusion is "throwing servers at problems" after years of reading the papers about Google infrastructure, you probably are a non infrastructure guy.

A serious conclusion should be that all these infrastructure enable application devs and researchers alike "to throw servers at problem". And these work are exactly the opposite, where they spent years and sometimes even decades meditating the nifty and figure out the most effective and efficient way of utilizing the servers.

With the demise of Moore's Law and physics education improving I imagine efficiency of the machines will eventually overtake developer time concerns.

It's not servers. It's who will have the best submarine cables. A game in which Apple is not participating btw. Not even with an Elon style moon, err, low earth orbit shot.

https://blog.apnic.net/2019/04/03/the-future-of-undersea-int...

A bit simplistic, no? There is more than one important factor.

Apple has no need for undersea cables.

It doesn't matter if iCloud is slow or not since most of the interactions with it are in the background. And all of it's content e.g. App Store or Apple Music are cached by CDNs which are hosted in pretty much every country.

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