Definition
Administrative Scalability ( Distributed System)
Administrative scalability is the dimension of scalability concerned with spanning increasing numbers of independently administered organisations or domains while maintaining the required quality of service.
Each domain may control its own resources, policies and access permissions. The system must coordinate across these boundaries and establish suitable trust relationships without requiring all participants to share one administrative authority.
Conflicting Policies
Independent domains may impose incompatible rules in four areas:
- Resource usage: who may use a resource, how much they may consume, and which requests receive priority.
- Billing: how usage is measured, who pays, and how costs are divided between domains.
- Management: who may configure, change or withdraw resources, and who is responsible for operation and recovery.
- Security: how each domain protects itself from actions originating in other domains. Trust must specify which domains are trusted, for which operations, and under which limitations. Those limitations must be enforced rather than merely agreed informally.
Administrative scalability requires cross-domain agreements and mechanisms that reconcile these policies while preserving each domain’s authority over its own resources. Trust in another domain does not imply unrestricted access.
Example
Telephone Number Portability
A customer keeps the same telephone number when changing providers. The providers must coordinate number assignment, routing updates and the transfer of service responsibility despite having separate resource-usage, billing, management and security policies.
Cooperation requires agreed procedures and limited access to the relevant information, not unrestricted access to either provider’s systems.