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Comment by JackPoach | Hacker News Reader

I am sure that AWS, Azure and Google Cloud will be the next victims of COVID-19. There's just no way to scale infrastructure up as fast as necessary. People think about cloud as 'elastic' but there's a fixed number of data centers with a fixed number of servers in each at any give time.

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Are you suggesting GCP/AWS/Azure will run out of capacity because of higher usage?

I am. They weren't built for the times with EVERYONE needs to scale up at the same time.

GC maybe, but AWS operates on another level.

Not sure what it's like nowadays, but 5 or so years ago, GC were very proud of being able to scale from 0 to a million users pretty much instantly. [0]

At the time AWS needed pre-warming. I've not needed to do that since, so I'm just assuming AWS solved that one (or everyone moved to serverless).

Obviously that's not the same as overall capacity, but the AWS good, everyone else bad rhetoric needs challenging sometimes.

Ouch.. that was a long time ago..

0: https://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2013/11/26/google-s...

As someone who used GCP at large scale very recently, "stock outs" we're very common for large instance types in specific zones.

I don't think we're talking about scaling out one cloud customers infra here, but scaling out many of them at once.

Correct, the issue is what do you do when everyone needs to scale up at the same time - Slack, Box, Netflix, etc.

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