just for back of the envelope, who many customers are you able to support per ec2 instance?
They were capable of scaling in a way that is certainly an anomaly, and not indicative of the costs of an ordinary team.
It speaks volumes about what the right talent and architecture/technology choices can do if leveraged successfully, but is more of an interesting anecdote than a realistic infrastructure budget.
That’s a pointless calculation. The acquisition wasn’t for the employees. As with all network-effects products, the acquisition was for the active user base. They could have acquired WhatsApp, fired the engineering team, rewrote it with an architecture that required 100x the servers and still been happy.
The instances we use are not the largest (we use 2xls) but we also incorporate spot instances as part of our autoscaling.