Wow, that are really high requirements. Stackoverflow was able to operate on a lot less servers in 2016, they had e.g. only 4 database servers.

Is there any analysis why parler did have such high requirements? Or what they did exactly to have such a high bandwidth?

Quoting from https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/23/parler-llc-...

"Immediately before AWS shut down all online services, Parler had over 15 million accounts and approximately 1 million new downloads of its app per day."

My interpretation is that they didn't have the time or the staff to fix the scalability bottlenecks in the site.

Parler probably could have deployed a scaled down feature set with significantly less computational resources.

Instead, Parler has spent weeks with just a single static (and perhaps handwritten?) HTML page.

Quoting from https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/23/parler-llc-...

"As a final matter, multiple members of Parler’s team have come to me expressing both fear for their career and fear for their lives and potentially bodily harm due to the press surrounding AWS’s claims. Many employees want to resign due to the strain and pressure they feel, fearing hostility towards our company and fearing for their own safety. Some have had articles written about them. Many are being harassed by reporters and journalists already. Some have had to cancel their phone numbers, and their family members’ phone numbers, due to harassment."

My guess is that most of Parler's technical staff are either in hiding or have quit. They have 15 million user accounts; I'm sure some of them are irate about their posts and metadata being publicly available. They're also facing harassment from the left but that's harder to quantify.

Just to be clear, I'm not endorsing harassment of Parler employees, AWS employees, or anyone else.

This list is ridiculous. It's probably someone entering a wishlist on a calculator to check the price (or a wildly optimistic 5 year forecast) vs actual requirements.

When I read it my first thought was: "damn no one wants to host them they are trying to convince someone to host them by having a huge invoice"