> Especially cautious knowing demand will spike this weekend?
At Stripe's scale, I doubt you could accurately forecast demand for a weekend like Black Friday. Last year's sales are just a data point; what matters this year is consumer confidence on a global macroeconomic scale. Who knows what that translates to?
> assuming their infra can scale quickly
Even if Stripe is handling spikes by scaling on a hyperscaler (e.g. AWS), this scale requires advanced coordination with the hyperscaler. They can't just spin up tens of thousands / hundreds of thousands of VM's on a whim, the underlying abstraction would leak and fail.
> Even if Stripe is handling spikes by scaling on a hyperscaler (e.g. AWS), this scale requires advanced coordination with the hyperscaler. They can't just spin up tens of thousands / hundreds of thousands of VM's on a whim, the underlying abstraction would leak and fail.
AWS uses predictors / models for this when you are on serverless and automatically allocates instances for you ahead of time.
No one needs 10,000 machines.
They likely have scale issues and cannot scale their database quick enough so they planned for the worst spike possible which is likely for a hour on cyber Monday.
At Stripe's scale, I doubt you could accurately forecast demand for a weekend like Black Friday. Last year's sales are just a data point; what matters this year is consumer confidence on a global macroeconomic scale. Who knows what that translates to?
> assuming their infra can scale quickly
Even if Stripe is handling spikes by scaling on a hyperscaler (e.g. AWS), this scale requires advanced coordination with the hyperscaler. They can't just spin up tens of thousands / hundreds of thousands of VM's on a whim, the underlying abstraction would leak and fail.