Success on the web is measured by usage and growth. Web-based companies live or die by the ability to scale their infrastructure to accommodate increasing demand. This book is a hands-on and practical guide to planning for such growth, with many techniques and considerations to help you plan, deploy, and manage web application infrastructure.
The Art of Capacity Planning is written by the manager of data operations for the world-famous photo-sharing site Flickr.com, now owned by Yahoo! John Allspaw combines personal anecdotes from many phases of Flickr's growth with insights from his colleagues in many other industries to give you solid guidelines for measuring your growth, predicting trends, and making cost-effective preparations.
Topics include:
<ul>
<li>Evaluating tools for measurement and deployment</li>
<li>Capacity analysis and prediction for storage, database, and application servers</li>
<li>Designing architectures to easily add and measure capacity</li>
<li>Handling sudden spikes</li>
<li>Predicting exponential and explosive growth</li>
<li>How cloud services such as EC2 can fit into a capacity strategy</li>
</ul>
In this book, Allspaw draws on years of valuable experience, starting from the days when Flickr was relatively small and had to deal with the typical growth pains and cost/performance trade-offs of a typical company with a Web presence. The advice he offers in The Art of Capacity Planning will not only help you prepare for explosive growth, it will save you tons of grief.

The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources

Computers & Technology

Allspaw, John

Computer Science

O'Reilly Media

A web application involves many specialists, but it takes people in web ops to ensure that everything works together throughout an application's lifetime. It's the expertise you need when your start-up gets an unexpected spike in web traffic, or when a new feature causes your mature application to fail. In this collection of essays and interviews, web veterans such as Theo Schlossnagle, Baron Schwartz, and Alistair Croll offer insights into this evolving field. You'll learn stories from the trenches--from builders of some of the biggest sites on the Web--on what's necessary to help a site thrive.
<ul>
<li>Learn the skills needed in web operations, and why they're gained through experience rather than schooling</li>
<li>Understand why it's important to gather metrics from both your application and infrastructure</li>
<li>Consider common approaches to database architectures and the pitfalls that come with increasing scale</li>
<li>Learn how to handle the human side of outages and degradations</li>
<li>Find out how one company avoided disaster after a huge traffic deluge</li>
<li>Discover what went wrong after a problem occurs, and how to prevent it from happening again</li>
</ul>
Contributors include:
John Allspaw Heather Champ Michael Christian Richard Cook Alistair Croll Patrick Debois Eric Florenzano Paul Hammond Justin Huff Adam Jacob Jacob Loomis Matt Massie Brian Moon Anoop Nagwani Sean Power Eric Ries Theo Schlossnagle Baron Schwartz Andrew Shafer

Web Operations: Keeping the Data On Time

Robbins, Jesse

Web Development & Design

In their early days, Twitter, Flickr, Etsy, and many other companies experienced sudden spikes in activity that took their web services down in minutes. Today, determining how much capacity you need for handling traffic surges is still a common frustration of operations engineers and software developers. This hands-on guide provides the knowledge and tools you need to measure, deploy, and manage your web application infrastructure before you experience explosive growth.
In this thoroughly updated edition, authors Arun Kejariwal (MZ) and John Allspaw provide a systematic, robust, and practical approach to capacity planning—rather than theoretical models—based on their own experiences and those of many colleagues in the industry. They address the vast sea change in web operations, especially cloud computing.
<ul>
<li>Understand issues that arise on heavily trafficked websites or mobile apps</li>
<li>Explore how capacity fits into web/mobile app availability and performance</li>
<li>Use tools for measuring and monitoring computer performance and usage</li>
<li>Turn measurement data into robust forecasts and learn how trending fits into the planning process</li>
<li>Examine related deployment concepts: installation, configuration, and management automation</li>
<li>Learn how cloud autoscaling enables you to scale your app’s capacity up or down</li>
</ul>

The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources in the Cloud

Kejariwal, Arun

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