[twic]

Part of why i ask is to get an idea of what those tens of thousands of instances are doing. How much of your leviathan scale is about the sheer mass of requests, how much of it is about the depth and sophistication of what you do to serve every request, and how much is about providing an environment which supports deployment and operation of the code which serve those requests?

I used carbon-relay in one job, and if you're using that, i'd guess you have 1000 machines serving users, and 30000 collecting metrics!

[cpwatson]

Our architecture and the sheer number of microservices contributes to much of the scale. In order to achieve the engineering velocity and reliability goals we felt the explosion of instances with this architecture was worth it. If you consider the number of microservice instances serving user traffic (and include persistency tiers such as memcache and cassandra) you would still be in the tens of thousands.