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The title is a paraphrase of something Raymond Blum, who leads a team of Site Reliability Engineers at Google, said in his talk How Google Backs Up the Internet. I thought it a powerful enough idea that it should be pulled out on its own:
Mr. Blum explained common backup strategies don’t work for Google for a very googly sounding reason: typically they scale effort with capacity.
If backing up twice as much data requires twice as much stuff to do it, where stuff is time, energy, space, etc., it won’t work, it doesn’t scale.
You have to find efficiencies so that capacity can scale faster than the effort needed to support that capacity.
A different plan is needed when making the jump from backing up one exabyte to backing up two exabytes.
When you hear the idea of not scaling effort with capacity it sounds so obvious that it doesn't warrant much further thought. But it's actually a profound notion. Worthy of better treatment than I'm giving it here:
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