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Comment by brunoborges | Hacker News Reader

> What would have perhaps been a more fair comparison is to share the peak load that Google services running on GCP generated on Spanner, and not the sum of their cloud platform.

Not necessarily about volume of transactions, but this is similar to one of my pet-peeves with statements that use aggregated numbers of compute power.

"Our system has great performance, dealing 5 billion requests per second" means nothing if you don't break down how many RPS per instance of compute unit (e.g. CPU).

Scales of performance are relative, and on a distributed architecture, most systems can scale just by throwing more compute power.

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Yeah I've seen some pretty sneaky candidates try that on their resumes. They aggregate the RPS for all the instances of their services even though they don't share any dependencies nor infrastructure. They're just independent instances/clusters running the same code. When I dug into those impressive numbers and asked about how they managed coordination/consensus the truth comes out.

True, but one would hope that both sides in this case would be putting their best foot forward. Getting peak performance out of right sizing your DB is part of that discussion. I can't imagine AWS would put down "126 million QPS" if they COULD have provided a larger instance that could deliver "200 million QPS", right? We have to assume at some point that both sides are putting their best foot forward given the service.

The 126M QPS number was certainly parts of Amazon.com retail that powers Prime Day not all of DDB traffic. If we were to add up all of DDB's volume, it would be way higher. At least a magnitude if not more.

Large parts of AWS itself uses DDB - both control plane and data plane. For instance, every message sent to AWS IoT will internally translate to multiple calls to DDB (reads and writes) as the message flows through the different parts of the system. IoT itself is millions of RPS and that is just one small-ish AWS service.

Source: Worked at AWS for 12 years.

Put yourself in the shoes of who they're targeting with that.

Probably dealing with thousands of requests per seconds, but wants to say they're building something that can scale to billions of requests per second to justify their choices, so there they go.

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