I have 100% failed interviews by giving that answer when their definition of scale was 10,000!!!! req/sec. Like sorry dude in 2026 that's not much different than 10 req/sec and my original design would work just fine... But that's what happens when your interviewer is a "senior" 24 year old just reading off the prompt.

10,000!!!! is such a huge number I don't think we could even represent with a computer.

Being obviously pedantic here, I agree with what you meant.

Well, it depends what those requests are doing surely? I always thought it was weird to treat "request" as a unit of measurement. Are you requesting a static help page, or a GraphQL search query?