highwayscale
Highwayscale is a term used in software engineering to describe an approach to building and operating very large-scale, globally distributed web services. The term is a metaphor drawn from highway networks to convey predictable, high-capacity traffic flow across geographic regions. It is not a formal standard, but a concept used in industry discussions to contrast with monolithic or loosely coupled systems that cannot guarantee performance at scale.
Key ideas include designing for horizontal scalability, partitioned data management, and deterministic routing. The highway metaphor
Architectural patterns often associated with highwayscale include microservices with clear boundaries, event-driven communication, edge computing, multi-region
Benefits include improved resilience, better global latency, and disciplined scalability as demand grows. Challenges encompass complexity
See also: scalable architecture, cloud-native, microservices, service mesh, edge computing.