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Comment by benoau | Hacker News Reader

Not just 20 years old - an almost flawless 20 years at massive scale.

It's funny that things that are pinnacles of human engineering exist like this where the general public has no idea it even exists, though they (most likely) use it every single day.

I find red dead redemption 2 more impressive. I don’t know why. It sounds stupid but S3 on the surface has the simplest api and it’s just not impressive to me when compared to something like that.

I’m curious which one is actually more impressive in general.

Simple to use from an external interface yes, the backend is wildly impressive.

Some previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36900147

> S3 on the surface has the simplest api and it’s just not impressive [...]

Reminded of the following comment from not too long ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43363055

AWS has said that the largest S3 buckets are spread over 1 million hard drives. That is quite impressive.

Red dead redemption 2 is likely on over 74 million hard drives.

There's likely over a trillion active SQLite databases in use right now.

I think you misunderstood. They're not saying S3 uses a million hard drives, they're saying that there exist some large single buckets that use a million hard drives just for that one bucket/customer!

actually data from more than one customer would be stored on those million drives. But data from one customer is spread over 1 million drives to get the needed IOPs from spinning hard drives.

That's the strangest comparison I have seen. What axis are you really comparing here? Better graphics? Sound?

Complexity and sheer intelligence and capability required to build either.

And what is the basis for your claim? You are not impressed by AWS's complexity and intelligence and capability to build and manage 1-2 zettabytes of storage near flawlessly?

Im more impressed by red dead redemption 2 or baldurs gate 3.

There is no “basis” other my gut feeling. Unless you can get quantified metrics to compare that’s all we got. For example if you had lines of code for both, or average IQ. Both would lead towards the “basis” which neither you or I have.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com