Rant: What Scale is Not

5m talk on the characteristics of large systems

Transcript

1. Rant: What Scale is Not
2. Why am I angry? Scale is used as an excuse. “Maybe you’ve never worked on a large system before.” -- Y! Manager 2007
3. Scale - What is it? “Scalability is the capability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work, or its potential to be enlarged in order to accommodate that growth” --wikipedia
4. Scale is: Things are working and they aren’t likely to break this week. Or next.
5. Scale is not: • Efficient • Correct • Maintainable • Operatable • Documented
6. Why this matters? Large systems have some inherent qualities, but your design decisions are by far the largest contributors to the systems characteristics.