Essential scalability vocabulary

I found a great article “Farms, clones, partitions, packs, RACS, and RAPS – Improve your scalability vocabulary” by Bill Devlin,Jim Gray,Bill Laing,George Spix from Microsoft. It summarize most main concepts I came across after weeks of reading on building a scalable system.

Two main ways of building a scalable system is cloning and partitioning.

Cloning offer both scalability and availability. But the problem with cloning is bad write performance and constrain of memory.

Partitioning divide data among nodes. It offer scalability. And availability can be achieved by replication data on a backup machine.But the problem with partitions is sometime it is difficult to do the partition in real life because of great dependences.

Following is the table of scalability taxonomy

Worse is Better

Worse is Better, Many people will find it rather funny.However this philosophy does work. First introduced by Richard P.Gabriel in 1990, this theory occurs at all levels of scale.

In common sense :

• First-to-Market Wins
• The best technology Wins
• The most innovative Wins

But in real world you may find the completist can’t bring home the bacon. Based on the worse is better theory , Gabriel created a model to transform technology into successful products. Some main point in this model is :

• Don’t choose the most cutting edge technology,maybe 1o years out of the lab
• Choose a technology that appeals to the needs of market
• The design should have simplicity, minimal completeness,minimal correctness
• The implementation should be small,fast,interoperated with existing product and bug-free

You can get more detailed informations in the page , and enjoy Gabriel’s sense of humor through all his

• Worse is Better
• Worse Is Better Is Worse
• Is Worse Really Better?
• Back to the Future: Is Worse (Still) Better?
• Back to the Future: Worse (Still) is Better!