It's a good glimpse of what unlimited cloud budget does to companies. I quote:
"""
* 40x i3.Metal instances (64 vCPU's, 512 Gb ram (more ram, of course, better for those)), 14 Tb nVME e/a (Scylla cluster)
* 70-100x (96 vCPUs, 768 GB RAM) - 4 Tb nVME e/a (PSQL cluster, could use more RAM and CPU, but not easy to get)
* 300-400 various other instances, less picky, generally 8-16 cores w/ 32-64 Gb of ram as available
* Internal traffic ~300-400 Gb of traffic/minute
* External traffic ~100-120 Gb of traffic/minute
"""
Also, Gbpm.
Seems rather excessive for a mid-tier social networking website.
When I was at Tumblr they also overbuilt a huge amount of infrastructure just because they had the investor money - they dropped something like 1.4 million on two Cisco routers, each one could probably handle all the traffic in South America - but you need two of them, right? They dropped another half million a year on four network engineers to manage the two routers, and they had nothing to do most of the time so they sat around staging gladiatorial contests between a couple turtles and whatever the pet shop had that day. I’m sure the users would have been outraged and canceled Tumblr if they knew that was going on.
Actually that might be it. If they didn’t strip metadata then maybe they’re shuffling around all images and videos in whatever format and quality they got it? ie one big data lake of mystery content so to speak
Why not just measure things in random-sized-image-files-per-full-moon?
They are talking about traffic volume (bytes per minute; usually you'd see megabytes or gigabytes per hour but they are massive so they said per minute).
You are talking about transfer speed (bits per second).
You may have a very fast link (transfer speed = 40 Gbps) but transfer very low traffic (1 byte per hour), thus network is mostly idle.
Or you may have a very slow link (100 Mbps FastEthernet) but transfer a ton of traffic (gigabytes per hour), thus network is very busy (which requires good network architecture, server architecture, etc).
As others said: these requirements seem insane for the size of Parler. Maybe they are looking into massive redundancy, different locations, or even doing something else?
Absolutely. I have also said this countless times before in relation to self-hosted git. [0] Each time GitHub went down every week last year, I have made the case against the 'centralising everything' argument.
The social networks that didn't survive de-platforming are the ones that didn't self host. Parler is on that list.
More informations :
- line 1 : the Scylla DB Cluster would cost 59 000 USD according to AWS Calculator. Scylla DB is the C++ version of Apache Cassandra. It's a database.
- line 2 : this sounds like a bunch of postgreSQL server. Estimated price of 250 000 USD. Might be cheaper than Amazon RDS (?)
- line 3 : 400 instances 16 cores 64Gb -> 136 000 USD
Grand total 446 000 USD
We heard that it was around 300k USD on the news, so who can tell if it's true or not... anyway.
I don't see any wordpress nor specific technologies requirements.
I don't see any sources of revenue that could fund the hosting described.
