Indeed. On a singular i7 machine with a gigabit connection, a number of frameworks are in the 400,000-600,000rps range when returning super trivial responses. In comparison, from the original Google blog post:
To demonstrate scaling of the Compute Engine Load Balancing fanout we used 200 n1-standard-1’s Web Server running Apache v2.2.22 on Debian 7.1 Wheezy Images. Users are encouraged to use larger VM types for better single machine backend web serving, however here we demonstrated the scaling of the load balancer to backends and were not concerned with the backends themselves using every cycle to serve responses. Each backend web server received ~5K requests per second, which is an even distribution.
So, to match the peak rps of solid (but not top of the line) dedicated hardware appears to take upwards of ~120 instances of n1-standard-1 (assuming that it scales linearly, of course). Not a trivial number.
That said, I am impressed at how quickly this can scale up. If you have a site that normally runs fine on a couple of instances, but occasionally sees massive spikes in traffic, this could make sense. And from a purely engineering point of view, GCE and EC2 are quite interesting.
To demonstrate scaling of the Compute Engine Load Balancing fanout we used 200 n1-standard-1’s Web Server running Apache v2.2.22 on Debian 7.1 Wheezy Images. Users are encouraged to use larger VM types for better single machine backend web serving, however here we demonstrated the scaling of the load balancer to backends and were not concerned with the backends themselves using every cycle to serve responses. Each backend web server received ~5K requests per second, which is an even distribution.
So, to match the peak rps of solid (but not top of the line) dedicated hardware appears to take upwards of ~120 instances of n1-standard-1 (assuming that it scales linearly, of course). Not a trivial number.
That said, I am impressed at how quickly this can scale up. If you have a site that normally runs fine on a couple of instances, but occasionally sees massive spikes in traffic, this could make sense. And from a purely engineering point of view, GCE and EC2 are quite interesting.