And that's called hacking. Welcome to Hacker News. Discord's engineers are gods among mortals for squeezing this kind of latency and reliability out of something Google intended for consumers. Yes I know the way you're supposed to do something like this is to use something like Cloud BigTable where you probably have to call a salesperson and pay $20,000 before you're even allowed to try the thing. But Discord just ignored the enterprisey solution and took what they needed from the consumer tools instead. It reminds me of how early Google used to build data centers out of cheap personal computers.