Multidimensional Scaling

While it’s tempting to think of scaling along a single axis, for example Moore’s Law as just being about semiconductor line width, the reality is that real systems typically have multiple dimensions of scalability. Success is determined by being able to recognize the important dimensions and scale the right dimension at the right time in the right sequence.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the largest distributed database in the world. We’ll discuss how multidimensional scaling applied to DNS in the past, and what it means for the future. We’ll also discuss some other systems to argue the principle is pretty universal.