Jorge Caballero, MDTwitter's engineering team is just 3 hamsters in an overcoat at this point
There are roughly twice as many engineers working on Mastodon infrastructure as there are Twitter employees (across all functions)
10K servers— let's assume each server requires 0.25 full-time equivalent to maintain: that's 2,500 engineers.
According to this recent article, Twitter's headcount sits at ~1,300...and fewer than 550 are full-time engineers
A Library Socialist@DataDrivenMD that many servers, there's no reason to assume served count maintenance is linear. You're doing some form of automation, hopefully containerized in 2023.
@matty that's why I discounted the value by 75%.
@DataDrivenMD but that doesn't account for it.
If the first server takes 25 engineer hours, but I can reuse the image in a K8s cluster (for example) and it takes .00001 minutes to deploy each additional one, I can run thousands of servers without issue.
@matty Something tells me you haven't tried to scale a Mastodon instance. Either that or you have the world's best Helm chart and aren't sharing with anyone else...and you figured out how to deconstruct a monolithic Ruby on Rails stack so that it's lean and performant at scale...and told nobody else that's running an instance anywhere in the world about it
@DataDrivenMD believe you're discussing twitter here though, not Mastodon. Very different use case for thousands of instances of a company's proprietary server and orchestration versus a federated model, etc.
The point remains - the first one might take thousands of hours, but the scaling isn't linear. Modern scaling almost never is!