[bhaney]

That would result in multiple distinct instances of HN that don't share data. You're thinking of an architecture with a separate central data store that all the instances access and update, but that is not how HN works to my knowledge.

[shaneprrlt]

:mind-blown: Hats off to PG for building an app that could handle 4m requests with the architecture of a small hobby project.

[foldr]

That's just how powerful modern hardware is. You don't need a k8s cluster to run a simple CRUD app under realistic loads. I'm sure the hackernews codebase has acquired some performance optimizations over the years, but I doubt that it's doing anything especially clever performance-wise.