[foz]

Growing infrastructure by orders of magnitude makes more sense to me, and is often how I hear the term used. I was at a conference in Berlin a few years ago and Joyent gave a talk about scaling which touched on this very topic.

The argument given was that you should plan infrastructure expansion with orders of magnitude. For example, increasing disk space from 10tb to 100tb. Or replacing a network switch with one that has 10x traffic capacity. The reasoning goes that the time spent engineering the expansion is a better investment at 10x, rather than having to increase infrastructure incrementally.