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The article is good, and informative but a little odd in one respect. It uses air-quotes to introduce concepts like "rack" and "shelf" in a DC, but does O(logn) notation mid-flow.

If you don't know what a rack is, how are you meant to know what the Order of scaling function means? Thats a highly computer sciences specific notation, and if you grok O(n) you know what a rack, a host, a DC is.

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Hah fair point, I was trying to write for a more general audience. Part of blogging for me is to improve my written communication skills. Appreciate this!

Something like "scales linearly" or "scales exponentially" probably covers it, for whatever case it was (I forget)

really good article btw. really enjoyed reading it.

might pay to flag when systems you talk about are twitter-internal or are open-source. People love that kind of thing. "wow: twitter uses the gnu C compiler" type thing.

I get your point that both of these are specialized notations/terminologies, but it's entirely possible for somebody to understand algorithmic complexity without knowing what "a rack, a host, a DC" is, there's no inherent connection between the two. As somebody whose interests tend to be more theoretical than practical, myself prior to reading the article would be an example.

As the OP said "I was trying to write for a more general audience."

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