Defining the Internet Scale

I really like crisp definitions. Actually, that was an understatement – I obsess about them. Perfectly defining something helps me fully understand it, separate from related, but distinct concepts and, ultimately, conquer it. It’s like knowing the true name of your magic adversary in a fantasy novel.

I have been working on a paper about Monitoring on the Internet Scale and, naturally, I wanted to open it with the definitions of monitoring (I happen to have a fairly good one) and Internet Scale. After doing a lot of searching and quite a bit of thinking, I came up with the following:

Internet Scale is really big. While there is no common definition, systems that are rightfully referred to as being internet-scale typically consist of 10s of thousands nodes, service 10s of millions users and performing 10s of billions actions per day. It is also important to point that the size implied by the internet scale designation is constantly growing with its namesake

And, being a visual person, I would usually accompany this definition with one of the colorful OPTE Project images depicting the entire internet:

However, I had a nagging feeling that this definition, like Plato’splucked chicken, lacked something important. And today I came up with a better definition of an internet-scale system, which appears to capture the nature of the phenomenon while distinguishing it from the other like concepts. It also does not need to be adjusted for inflation (of the internet). Without further ado:

An internet-scale system is a system where engineers stop worrying about scale, scalability and scaling and leave worrying about it to the accountants.