[remus]

Is it that hard to imagine? They do 100B USD / yr revenue as a supermarket chain with 330k employees and a massive logistics operation. The software supporting the whole shebang is not gonna run on a spare macbook pro in a cupboard.

[whatever1]

You motivated why they need a big database. Still unclear to me why they need 40k VMs and not just 100.

Its ok for Amazon to do it since they paid for the physical machines anyway and they want to dogfood their AWS services, it does not make sense for someone who rents compute and licenses.

[Symbiote]

They have over 3000 stores. Maybe each one has a handful of VMs.

Maybe each self-service checkout runs a VM, or each staffed checkout.

They wouldn't want to rely entirely on a remote database to be able to sell products.

[roryirvine]

And their Dunnhumby division is a huge data consultancy in its own right, and likely the largest user of compute within the wider Tesco org.