Product Description

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: Evaluating tools for measurement and deployment Capacity analysis and prediction for storage, database, and application servers Designing architectures to easily add and measure capacity Handling sudden spikes Predicting exponential and explosive growth How cloud services such as EC2 can fit into a capacity strategy

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #27103 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 152 pages

About the Author
John Allspaw is currently Operations Engineering Manager at Flickr, the popular photo site. He has had extensive experience working with growing web sites since 1999. These include online news magazines (Salon.com, InfoWorld.com, Macworld.com) and social networking sites that experienced extreme growth (Friendster and Flickr). During his time at Friendster, traffic increased 5X. He was responsible for their transition from a couple dozen servers in a failing data center to over 400 machines across two data centers, and the complete redesign of the backing infrastructure. When he joined Flickr, they had 10 servers in a tiny data center in Vancouver; they are now located in multiple data centers across the US. Prior to his web experience, Allspaw worked in modeling and simulation as a mechanical engineer doing car crash simulations for the NHTSA.

Customer Reviews

Great Overview of Capacity Planning
John Allspaw brings a great deal of his experience with Flickr to this book and that makes it a five-star read in my view. Whether you are just getting started with capacity planning or a seasoned veteran, this book provides a critical overview of the fundamentals to ensure you're on the right path. That it also includes discussions on monitoring software and other practical tips is just a bonus. I wish I'd had this book available ten years ago but am glad it is out there now and hope it encourages others to share their experience as well.

An Approachable Treatment of a Complex Subject
The "Art" is an approachable treatment of a complex field of operations: capacity planning for high-traffic websites. Allspaw leverages his Flickr experience to give us a window into web operations as done by the pros.

The book keeps the high-level perspective necessary to give useful advice in a messy field, without getting lost in minutiae that would be specific to a given site. The author goes over the hows and whys of planning your capacity and the process needed to maintain it as traffic grows, with interesting insights such as designing for measurement (i.e. not mixing separate components of the architecture on the same machine in ways that hinders measurement of actual capacity), how to place a procurement process in place, and the ever-present point of presenting your data convincingly to the business owners that write the checks.

Allspaw places the emphasis on the right places, and does so in a concise manner: at less than 150 pages, this book packs a lot of meat for its pages, and as a fan of brevity the point did not go unnoticed on me. This is one of the best titles to come out of O'Reilly in the last few months, a must-have for your technical library if you work in the field.

Lucid and smart
I found Allspaw's book intelligent, easy to grasp and full of interesting bits of wisdom, gleaned from his experience at Flickr. A volume like this could easily be dense and plodding, but Allspaw manages to go deep without sacrificing readability. Excellent book.