when I joined twitter in 2011 there was a single mysql master user (not tweets) database and a few dozen read replicas. it was writing about 7000 updates per second and during bursts it would go too high for the single-threaded replication in mysql at the time to keep up with the master which would cause replication lag and all kinds of annoying things in the app. you just have to pick the right time to make the switch before it is an emergency.

The post tells you there is a single point of failure: if you wanted to DDOS OpenAI, you'd target write-heavy operations.

For that reason, I find it actually bold that they disclosed it, and I appreciate it.

The article reminded me of a similar post about MySQL use for Facebook from the Meta team, which had the same message: big database servers are powerful workhorses that scale and are very cost-effective (and simpler to manage than distributed setups where writes need be to carefully orchestrated - a very hard task).

The two core mesages of both articles combined could be read as: 1. big DB servers are your friend and 2. keep it simple, unless you can't avoid the extra complexity any more.