Comment by jll29
11 hours ago
The post tells you there is a single point of failure: if you wanted to DDOS OpenAI, you'd target write-heavy operations.
For that reason, I find it actually bold that they disclosed it, and I appreciate it.
The article reminded me of a similar post about MySQL use for Facebook from the Meta team, which had the same message: big database servers are powerful workhorses that scale and are very cost-effective (and simpler to manage than distributed setups where writes need be to carefully orchestrated - a very hard task).
The two core mesages of both articles combined could be read as: 1. big DB servers are your friend and 2. keep it simple, unless you can't avoid the extra complexity any more.
What Facebook post are you referring to? Generally speaking, Facebook's MySQL infra has been heavily sharded for a very long time, and doesn't rely on abnormally-beefy servers. It's basically the complete opposite approach of what OpenAI is describing here.