Scaling is like memory management

Wednesday, January 23, 2008 by Dave Winer.

Continuing the thread on commoditization of scalable server software, the third installment. 

Matt Tucker said: "I'm not sure that S3 magically kills off the scaling priests. It certainly makes it easy to turn on more storage resources, but writing an application to scale efficiently across multiple virtual machines is no easy task." 

To which I responded... It won't make scaling obsolete, but what it does do is commodify it. 

Right now I can't buy a Jabber server that scales without also hiring someone who will scale it for me. But in a few years I should be able to buy a Jabber server that, when it needs more CPUs, just asks for them all transparently to the user, the same way my word processor asks the OS for more memory today. 

I remember word processors that didn't do memory management, you got a 64K buffer and that's it. One document. When you filled it up, you started another. 

Technology will go forward and scaling won't be a black art, it'll be something built into the software you license.