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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Never heard of this "hyperscale" concept before. How is this any different from... scaling?

In general every order of magnitude brings new challenges. Companies running over a million servers have a lot of problems that smaller ones don't. Also they just have more room to amortize R&D.

The "H" in ADHD stands for "hyperactivity". This implies _significantly_ more activity than the norm to a point where they really stand out.

In sci-fi a spaceship travelling at "hyperspeed" was perceived to be so much faster than anything known to man that it would be difficult to comprehend.

The performance and cost of a hypercar compared to the average family car is sometimes difficult to understand too. The average person would have to work (potentially) hundreds of years to afford a €10M hypercar.

"Hyperscale" is so large that even us working in tech have difficulty grasping it because we have nothing tangible to compare it to. A million servers is bind boggling to me even with the "cattle not pets" mindset

Supermarkets and super cars aren't enough. We need hypermarkets and hyper cars to be current. So now we can’t just scale, I guess that’s for trucks, so to be current you need hyperscale.

Cybertruck and cyberscale?

(I'm joking)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermarket ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

give it a couple more years, we'll have ultrascale

And then the wiiscale?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperscale_computing

> In computing, hyperscale is the ability of an architecture to scale appropriately as increased demand is added to the system.

So yeah just scaling. I agree I've never heard the word "hyperscale" before and don't think we need that extra intensifier for a well-understood idea.

1x, 10x, 1000x are all "scales", yet problems may be a little bit different at each of them

I'm just quoting the wikipedia definiton of hyperscale. Nowhere in there does it say anything about 1000x, probably because that is an ill-defined concept.

1000x what? Today's computers are a 1000x the ones from the 90s, should we call them all hypercomputers? Pretty much any startup can boot 20,000 nodes on aws, are they all hyperstartups hyperscaling?

Seems like marketing nonsense.

I'm guessing you're mad about the term but not the concept? And that you do agree, that scaling from 1 to 10 is not the same animal as scaling from 10 to 100? So why, then, call both animals "plain and simple scaling"?

> And that you do agree, that scaling from 1 to 10 is not the same animal as scaling from 10 to 100? So why, then, call both animals "plain and simple scaling"?

So you think we need 4 different words for scaling 1-10, 10-100, 100-1000....?

Cut it out, you know it's just marketing hype. Not everything needs its own word.

It makes sense to have different words for totally different orders of scaling, yes.

>1000x what? Today's computers are a 1000x the ones from the 90s, should we call them all hypercomputers? Pretty much any startup can boot 20,000 nodes on aws, are they all hyperstartups hyperscaling?

Why compare to the past capabilities, wtf?

>Pretty much any startup can boot 20,000 nodes on aws, are they all hyperstartups hyperscaling?

Now think how many nodes can Google, Microsoft, Fb, etc. run in their 10s of datacenters.

The word hyperscale afaik was coined by Wall St people as a collective noun for FB, Google, MS, et al, in the context of their in-house data center operations.

I dislike the term 'hyperscale' as it lacks concrete meaning. We need a metric akin to kilobytes or megabytes for storage. Terms like 'kiloscale' and 'megascale' could better indicate the scaling range of a service. For instance, scaling a service to a thousand instances and back to zero or rolling out patches to thousand instances could be termed 'kiloscale'.

That's why I brought up the question, and I'm baffled why so many people have been downvoting it. To me, its use seems very specific yet nothing I read about it told me anything concrete. From what I can tell, it actually is meant to broadly mean the extreme end of scaling. The threshold is still unknown to me, but I'll just take it that Meta is hyperscale.

Universe scale i guess.

Size of the entire universe man

Multiverse.

Meta already does that.

Yeah, and this isn't a problem that interacts with scale. If you can patch 100 servers with an automated method you can patch 1,000,000 of them.

This is absolutely a problem that interacts with scale. With 1M servers you’re almost certainly dealing with hundreds of service owners, and some of those are going to need additional features you don’t have to worry about with 100 servers. Some examples are databases with graceful failover, long running AI model training jobs, or distributed databases like etc where you have to be mindful about how many can be down at a time.

It’s not 10,000x harder to patch that 10,000x more machines, but it’s not 1x either. Easily 10-20x harder, if not more.

And at a certain scale patches will come out faster than you can deploy them!

What you're describing has nothing to do with the number of servers and everything to do with the number of services.

That's not scale, that's organizational sprawl.

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