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Comment by baby_souffle | Hacker News Reader

> I would love to know what software stack, hardware, and uplink connections in total they utilize to accomplish a real-world 80k request per second throughput. How many instances do you guys think Amazon runs for its primary e-commerce front-end stack? In total, and per region? Assuming they have a multi-region rollout. > But I never see anyone talk about real-world numbers. Just synthetic poopoo.

The number probably changes all the time based on load. They'll never release these details because it's a competitive advantage to have the "how popular are they in $place at $time-of-day" data private.

When they do share numbers, it'll always be the most flattering and devoid of any context beyond the "wow" factor.

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While I can understand the cynicism, the real answer is a lot closer to something much more boring, which is most people just don't care about the actual numbers, and if they were to release them, while interesting to a small few, generally no one would actually care.

There's also a common misnomer that Amazon.com is somehow just this one giant app running on a set of servers, which isn't remotely how it's actually deployed, and that's before we spend time arguing whether a team's instances even count as "primary e-commerce front-end stack" or not. :P

Also their "stack" includes various degrees of AWS (maws, naws, and I'm sure a bunch of snowflake situations innumerable here, I mean do you count corpinfra? Controls?)

Not to mention all the data center logistics

I'm not sure it's the biggest deal in the world, plus real-world market presence data is regularly detailed in shareholder reports for various companies.

You could take low-end instance specifications and standard industry stacks and extrapolate forward how many instances they might need to maintain at a maximum, but those numbers are going to be off.

Are they running 400 low-end front-end instances across the globe? Probably, (plus the 40 or so other services they claim to need, multiplied by region count at a minimum) and that would actually be well below realistic and reasonable for a company like Amazon. You can take a bunch of regional instances that handle roughly 200 req/s and make that work.

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