I’m just wondering something.
How much capacity does the servers have
about 5 people after that, the servers catch fire, the office monkey smells cooked wire and starts chewing on them and then a radioactive meltdown starts to occur once you hit 10 people.
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It’s not just one server, each realm is made of many servers and that can have many shards if needed. WoW is a quasi-mega server.
Personally i think they are slowly moving to a mega server.
Do you still have the picture in your mind that when you select one realm in the realm list is equivalent to a real physical server?
Forget it. It has not worked like that since years ago. There is no relation between realms and servers anymore, the game work by creating and destroying shard per zones when required and the only problem is how many people can handle a shard, but not even that is a problem because if there are too many people the system create a new shard to split the players.
At the end we only could define that one shard is only in one server (but probably one server can handle multiple shards, especially the ones for zones with low population) but even so that server is still not a physical machine.
Becuase WOW is not running anymore on servers from Blizzard data centers, that business model is obsolete. Blizzard has their servers virtualized on the cloud, in Amazon, with that they can have today a number of servers and increase it for DF launch to be able to increase the number of shards, and then decrease it later when the population drops. Blizzard has as many virtualized servers as they need.
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Not enough for the launch of expansions but plenty for after that.
Source…?
it is 25 players 
The devs talks from Classic development before it was launched. They explained there that one of the problems to make Classic is that the original vanilla server code was made for on-premise servers and current Blizzard servers are on a cloud-based infrastructure. That is one of the reasons why they opted to use Legion server code with Vanilla data ported, because Legion servers is ready to work on cloud servers.
I can comfirm that it’s more than 4.
You specifically said amazon, and I doubt it’s public could.
Cloud servers are owned by Steam not Amazon
I read some time ago that the provider they use is Amazon, but I am unable to find the source now. Anyway, there is no reason to doubt Blizzard could have it on an external provider like Amazon, most companies are moving to that business. I work in a multinational bank that is moving its server infrastructure to Amazon. Also, I said cloud, not public cloud, Amazon also provides private cloud infrastructure.
What I can find is that people have noticed the traffic from WOW and Blizzard in general points towards IPs reported to belong to Amazon Web Service.
I am not talking about Steam Cloud I talking about the concept of cloud server infrastructure, Steam Cloud is an example of a cloud server. Steam Cloud is just one cloud, it is not the only one in the world. Amazon has its own cloud-based infrastructure, Google too, other companies have their own internal private clouds, etc.
I suspect some infrastructure will be on amazon cloud. I read an article while googling what you said that their esports is based on AWS. However I doubt WoW would be on Amazon’s cloud we’d know about that,
Interestingly when Microsoft purchase them there’s scope to go on Azure.
The company I work for has newer stufff on AWS, Azure and Oracle.
You mentioned the word i was looking for at the event end.
Virutalization. A virtual server is a server that exists on a server along with many other servers at the same time on the same server.
They can allocate, create or destroy, at will, or take away virtual servers on a server as they do not exist in the traditional physical sense.
You can have a virtual server even span accross multiple physical servers as well.
A server today, is not a box, a computer, anymore. They are just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s on any number of SSD’s/HDD.
Not nearly enough, so lunch days are a headache not to mention a certain bald streamer can organize a server-crash party
A server, not a realm, could possibly hold up to 500 players. Modern hardware is fast and servers have lots of memory. Far more than your average home computer.
Home computers tend to have anywhere from 1 and possibly as high as 64 gigs of memory. Servers go beyond that.
Cant rly be true.
Why did draenor and silvermoon collasp at SL launch while every other server stayed perfectly fine if there was no server themselves now.
This would make very good sense, what with all the dead and dying realms where guilds cannot form.
In fact, all they need to do is make guilds and the AH x-realm and it’s done. All the sharding that goes on means nobody really plays on their own server anyway…
(Exception for RP realms, but even then, we do get sharded players showing up.)
Because cloud infrastructure only means as many resources as they need in theory. In the practice, those resources must be paid so every company that uses a cloud service has a maximum on their contract with the provider. Probably Blizzard determined is not worthy to pay for extra resources only for a few days.
Probably on SL launch they reached the maximum of shards they can have and given by default big realms like Draenor and Silvermoon have assigned their own shards at this point those shards reach the maximum population they can’t handle, without being able to create more shards.
There are no physical servers, but there are still virtual servers, and those could still crash. A shard with too many players will collapse. In normal circumstances that doesn’t happen because they can open more shards, probably on launch days they are not able to do it.
But there has to be some level of servers involved if yoy can flood into these shards from other servers and only 2 cannot.
As even blizzard said theres to many people on their servers, so some server devide must exist based on the server ur on