

"Web Scale" - uggedal
http://www.jacobian.org/writing/web-scale/

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Locke1689
I agree with Zed Shaw here -- both "web scale" and your definition are not
very good. "Web scale" is especially bad because it can mean anything and be
used by anybody.

However, your definition doesn't really make sense either. Exactly what is
being scaled here? Static web hits? Database lookups? Database writes? What
characterizes your ability to scale? Sharding? Distributed processing or
retrieval a la MapReduce? Instead of describing what you _think_ your
architecture can handle, why not try describing exactly _what_ your
architecture can handle. If someone is actually trying to convince me that
their architecture is a good one I don't ever want to hear "web scale," I want
to see graphs and hear means, medians, standard deviations, and confidence
intervals.

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jfarmer
Reed's law follows from the fact that a set has 2^N possible subset. So it's a
statement about how group membership affects the dynamics of a social network.

There are O(N^2) possible connections, which is related to Metcalfe's law.

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Locke1689
Metcalfe's Law is trivially reducible from the number of edges in a complete
graph.

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seiji
Your web scale number is the Levenshtein distance between your company's
operations and Google.

To me, "web scale" means "We can consume, store, organize, process, transform,
and deliver information for the entire world." Web scale is planet scale
information technology.

