Why? I'm assuming their highish engineer/service ratio is because their services do less individually.
Anecdotally, I've worked on services that ran tens of thousands of instances across the world. You build the tools to manage them and it works very well.
People talk about interpreted languages being slow sometimes, now your program is divided over 1700 separate servers and instead of keeping variables in memory you have to serialize and send them over the network all the time.
Anecdotally, I've worked on services that ran tens of thousands of instances across the world. You build the tools to manage them and it works very well.