ScalingMyth

Context : OnScale

Many things in nature just don't scale.

Why should we expect processes and architecture to?

• MichaelFeathers The Myth of Scaling

See also :

• IsMassNatural
• OnGranularity
• FractalCleanUpCrew

Thought on this quote :

Can you sense the belief in this [an agile methodology] point of view? The hope that we can find the one right form that is going to work for us at all scales? We want to believe that desperately, don’t we? We want to believe it because we want to avoid disruptive change - it’s expensive. But believing that it’s unnatural may be worse.

Nature sometimes accepts dramatic disruptive changes. Eg. caterpillar to butterfly.

Contrast :

JoeArmstrong says you should start designing for scale (billions of users) - as in using lots of small decoupled processes communicating via messages - even when you start with 10 users. Then it costs nothing to scale. Obviously, his point is that design for scale is actually cheap if you include it at the beginning through massive decoupling and MessagePassing