Professional scenario conversions
SI prefixes in production systems
SI prefixes k, M, G shift by factors of 1000 in most SI usage, while binary prefixes Ki, Mi, Gi use 1024 in computing contexts. Mixing them silently corrupts capacity planning.
At scale, even a 2.4% gap between decimal GB and binary GiB becomes real money and real SLO misses.
Key takeaways
- Prefer `_bytes` integers in schemas; derive display strings separately.
- State whether telemetry uses 1e6 or 1024² bytes per sample.
- SLO rate limits: say whether the base is 1000 or 1024.
- Migration jobs: log formulas in code, not one-off spreadsheets.
How to convert
1 GB = 1,024 MB
Decimal vs binary prefixes
Storage marketing historically blurred MB meanings; modern labeling often states both decimal GB and binary GiB.
Telemetry sampling
Dashboards aggregating “megabytes per minute” must agree whether samples are 1e6 or 1024×1024 bytes.
Database and column naming
Prefer explicit suffixes like `_bytes` with integer types rather than ambiguous “size_mb”.
SLOs and error budgets
Rate limits per “1000 requests” vs “1024” matter at scale—state the base in SLO text.
Migration playbooks
When moving data between vendors, convert units in batch jobs with logged formulas, not one-off spreadsheets.
Bandwidth–delay product
Bytes in flight equals rate × RTT; capacity planning needs both Bps and latency, not only Gbps.
IOPS vs throughput
Small random IOPS and large sequential MB/s answer different questions—quote the workload shape when converting vendor specs.
Sampling interval vs peaks
One-minute dashboards under-report 1 s spikes; align metric granularity with SLO windows before converting to monthly totals.