Abuse procedures... Reality Checks

Wed Apr 11 23:18:07 UTC 2007

> > I know from experience this doesn't scale into the hundreds of  
> > thousands of customers and can only imagine the big ass eyeball  
> > network's scalability issues...

> Hear hear...
> 
> Scaling process and procedures is often as hard or harder than  
> scaling technical things...

It's true. But the big networks hire people who understand scaling
issues and know how to make things work. It's not up to us to solve
their scaling problem. If you can define a mechanism that will work on
smaller networks to achieve a goal, and if that goal is worthwhile
achieving, the the big networks will get their scalability networks to
scale it up. There is a similar problem in chemicals where researchers
create new compounds in the laboratory and then hand the details over to
scaling experts who know how to change the process to work on the scale
of a factory. And it's not unusual to see chemical factories that are
acres in size.

> The same thing happens with things like abuse -- it is easy to deal  
> with abuse on a small scale. It is somewhat harder on a medium scale  
> and harder still on a large scale -- the progression from small to  
> medium to large is close to linear. At some point though the  
> difficulty suddenly hockey-sticks and becomes distinctly non-trivial  
> -- this doesn't mean that it is impossible, nor that you should give  
> up, but rather that a different approach is needed.  Understanding  
> this is harder than understanding why you cannot grow your network  
> just by buying more X.

Yes this is true. But the people who find different approaches need to
see how the smaller networks solve a problem. Their skill is not in
finding solutions to abuse, but in figuring out how to restructure an
abuse solution to work on a huge scale.

--Michael Dillon