FWIW, a HN hug of death, which fairly regularly knocks sites offline tends to peak at a few dozen RP.

On the other hand, I've only seen complaint letters from AWS for doing tens of thousands of RPS on rate-limited endpoints for multiple days. Even then, AWS wasn't the initiator of inquiry (it was their customer being polled), and it wasn't a "cease and desist" kind of letter, it was "please explain what you're doing and prove you're not violating our ToS".

Why would aws care if you’re consuming one of their customers resources when the customer is the one that pays?

> 700 RPS is not a big number at all, for sure not enough to qualify as a DoS.

That depends on what's serving the requests. And if you're making the requests, it is your job to know that beforehand.