Yeah, I could see that even outside of the context of the Cassandra virtual nodes primitives.
These could be K8s nodes for example, that don't make full utilization of the underlying VM, which would completely make sense at APPL scale.
For some background to other HN users out there, "virtual" nodes refer to logical nodes in distributed database software where # of virtual nodes >= physical nodes. This means if the size of data passes a certain threshold, physical nodes can redistribute the virtual nodes, reducing the amount of data shuffled across physical nodes (as opposed to a naive hash function that mods a key by a fixed number and requires all nodes to reshuffle data when a new node is added).
These could be K8s nodes for example, that don't make full utilization of the underlying VM, which would completely make sense at APPL scale.
For some background to other HN users out there, "virtual" nodes refer to logical nodes in distributed database software where # of virtual nodes >= physical nodes. This means if the size of data passes a certain threshold, physical nodes can redistribute the virtual nodes, reducing the amount of data shuffled across physical nodes (as opposed to a naive hash function that mods a key by a fixed number and requires all nodes to reshuffle data when a new node is added).