Internet scale vs real world scale
February 02, 2023
Whether the internet services have reached the peak scale or not
Scaling of web applications
Web applications developers love to talk about scaling. We take pride in building systems which can handle a large number of transactions or host a large number of users. Additionally, the system should be able to scale up or down as per the current demand.
Real world scale
Although some Internet applications have grown to a very impressive scale, real world is still way larger. Here are a few examples:
Web applications developers love to talk about scaling. We take pride in building systems which can handle a large number of transactions or host a large number of users. Additionally, the system should be able to scale up or down as per the current demand.
Real world scale
Although some Internet applications have grown to a very impressive scale, real world is still way larger. Here are a few examples:
- Largest conferences or webinars handled by today's popular web conferencing tools are couple of million users. Compared to that, the size of a popular TV networks broadcasts like a popular cricket matches reach hundreds of millions of users.
- Offline retail sales is still 100X of online retail sales
- The world's largest online payment transaction system is UPI. It handles about 70 Billion transactions per year. Even though that is a very impressive number, it is still about 10% of actual financial transactions that take place yearly in India.
I guess, my point is that Internet is still small compared to the growth that may be coming in the future.
Naturally, as a technologist, the next questions we should ask are:
- Will the Internet's network infrastructure be able to handle the real world scale?
- Will the current application development methodology be able to handle it?
- Are we concentrating the services in too few places causing single points of failure? May be service providers themselves should think about decentralising.