Like the 30 ft. giant in 'Jack and the Beanstalk,' myths and fallacies abound
regarding application scaling. Many blog posts show some performance data as
time-series charts, but otherwise only offer a qualitative analysis. This talk
is intended to remedy that by showing you how to QUANTIFY scalability. Time
series are not sufficient to assess cost-benefit of cloud services and other
scalability trade-offs. After reviewing the nonlinear constraints on the
scalability of giants, we apply similar nonlinear data-analytics techniques to
determine the universal scalability constraints on such well-known applications
as: MySQL, Memcached, Varnish, Zookeeper, and Amazon AWS.