> Isn't that off by at least an order of magnitude though?
No, for all the reasons I just said?
> It forces them to operate a much larger cluster than should be necessary.
How much machine cost and operational effort do you imagine they would save if they reduced the qps by a factor of 10 without changing the number of regions, number of tables, or size of the data? How much SWE time do you imagine that'd take to do and maintain?
I've run a global Paxos-based database that received two orders of magnitude more qps than this. It cost less than you're probably imagining. I sometimes hunted down silly queries, but mostly leader ops, and mostly to mitigate hot spots or as a quixotic latency reduction effort...overall, this was the cheapest layer of the system.
A query to a well-implemented OLTP database is not like a request to some Python/PHP/Ruby app.
