This article says that Uber does about 1M requests a week. Which is about 1.65 reqs a sec.
So does this mean Uber can probably do with just one machine serving their requests? Or am I missing something here?
I realize traffic will be bursty but still doesn't seem like they'd need too many servers even at max load.
Edit: Let's assume we're building a bare bones version of uber where you don't do the realtime GPS locations of drivers & you don't have georeplication.
Say, the app has only this functionality: open the app, and order a cab. The phone triangulates your location and sends a request to the server who then responds with whether a driver was found or not
Best Answer
I guess Requests is "request for service" or order. (because there is "completed requests" metric slightly lower)
Their servers also constantly get's pinged by drivers devices (GPS and other stuff), users looking at available cars, gps tracking of users, etc.
I can't even say how many requests it will be for 1 trip. But if every car pings with GPS every minutes - count it. And thats just one thing.
Servers need to process all this data.
No, it's not out of 1 server :)