Parler Hosting Requirements

Copying their requirements as text (original grammar preserved, including GB and Gb confusions).<p>It&#x27;s a good glimpse of what unlimited cloud budget does to companies. I quote:<p>&quot;&quot;&quot;<p>* 40x i3.Metal instances (64 vCPU&#x27;s, 512 Gb ram (more ram, of course, better for those)), 14 Tb nVME e&#x2F;a (Scylla cluster)<p>* 70-100x (96 vCPUs, 768 GB RAM) - 4 Tb nVME e&#x2F;a (PSQL cluster, could use more RAM and CPU, but not easy to get)<p>* 300-400 various other instances, less picky, generally 8-16 cores w&#x2F; 32-64 Gb of ram as available<p>* Internal traffic ~300-400 Gb of traffic&#x2F;minute<p>* External traffic ~100-120 Gb of traffic&#x2F;minute<p>&quot;&quot;&quot;

Everything we’ve seen so far suggests they didn’t (don’t?) have the best tech people working for them, but they do have a lot of money at their disposal. This looks really over-provisioned compared to the reported size of their site, there is no caching layer that I can make out, I bet they are using those forty i3s to host user content as blobs in a database. If they added a couple varnish servers and moved the user content to S3 (or similar - you can get much better deals with the same api from other vendors) they could probably ditch &gt; 90% of this.<p>When I was at Tumblr they also overbuilt a huge amount of infrastructure just because they had the investor money - they dropped something like 1.4 million on two Cisco routers, each one could probably handle all the traffic in South America - but you need two of them, right? They dropped another half million a year on four network engineers to manage the two routers, and they had nothing to do most of the time so they sat around staging gladiatorial contests between a couple turtles and whatever the pet shop had that day. I’m sure the users would have been outraged and canceled Tumblr if they knew that was going on.

Given that they forgot to strip EXIF data I’m going to go with there being something completely absurd behind this.<p>Actually that might be it. If they didn’t strip metadata then maybe they’re shuffling around all images and videos in whatever format and quality they got it? ie one big data lake of mystery content so to speak

Gigabit per minute? Do they have a single knowledgeable networking architect on staff?<p>Why not just measure things in random-sized-image-files-per-full-moon?

According to Wikipedia, Parler has only 30 employees total. That presumably includes everything from management to engineering to legal. I wonder how big the engineering team is and how that affects these requirements. My casual guess is Facebook and Twitter are an order of magnitude more efficient with their hardware given their large staff and scale?

I have said it before, I will say it again: Own your infrastructure.

Not sure the original screenshot is true. Some people mentioned a Jarod but he&#x27;s not listed on Parler&#x27;s LinkedIn page.<p>More informations :<p>- line 1 : the Scylla DB Cluster would cost 59 000 USD according to AWS Calculator. Scylla DB is the C++ version of Apache Cassandra. It&#x27;s a database.<p>- line 2 : this sounds like a bunch of postgreSQL server. Estimated price of 250 000 USD. Might be cheaper than Amazon RDS (?)<p>- line 3 : 400 instances 16 cores 64Gb -&gt; 136 000 USD<p>Grand total 446 000 USD<p>We heard that it was around 300k USD on the news, so who can tell if it&#x27;s true or not... anyway.<p>I don&#x27;t see any wordpress nor specific technologies requirements.

How were they paying for this?<p>I don&#x27;t see any sources of revenue that could fund the hosting described.