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

by Arun Kejariwal, John Allspaw

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.


Understand issues that arise on heavily trafficked websites or mobile apps
Explore how capacity fits into web/mobile app availability and performance
Use tools for measuring and monitoring computer performance and usage
Turn measurement data into robust forecasts and learn how trending fits into the planning process
Examine related deployment concepts: installation, configuration, and management automation
Learn how cloud autoscaling enables you to scale your app's capacity up or down

Genres: Technology, Technical, Software, Computer Science, Nonfiction, Programming, Engineering

236 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a Good introduction to capacity planning, but you'll find nothing new if you have already read Google SRE book or Performance: Enterprise and cloud by Brendan Gregg.

[Mark McGranaghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author says "a good deal of the information in this book will seem a lot like common sense", which I'd agree with. It all seems eminently reasonable, but you may not find many net-new things in reading it if you're experienced with basic systems administration and operations.

[Nat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book, I skimmed a lot of sections, but in general it has great content on running cloud services.

[João Maia · Rating 4 out of 5]

O livro foi escrito em uma época que ainda se falava muito de data center e não tinha docker mas os conceitos são extremamente valiosos. O livro tem muita referência externa.

[ezequiel orbe · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was expecting more from this book. It's a basic book although good for those who doesn't know anything about the topic. The Reading and Reference sections are pretty good though.

[Ivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Не так хорошо как "Web Operations". Ну и не так актуально, при современном засилье облаков.

[Pedro Plassen Lopes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book to get pointers (book references, links) on capacity planning, resource monitoring, auto scaling techniques. Some neat tricks are shared, such as finding a system metric (cpu, disk i/o, etc) that correlates directly with the overall service performance, thus simplifying the identification of the service limits. Also the complexities in defining autoscaling rules are reviewed, with several mathematical models provided. Worth the reading!

[Ethan J · Rating 3 out of 5]

got 1 idea of monitoring is useful from the book, otherwise not useful

[Elene Latsoshvili · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite interesting book. The author gives examples and problems that they had to solve while working on Flickr. I came to the conclusion that there was no exact answer how to plan capacity, because every application is specific.. but examples and reviews of what might get into your way was still helpful

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this in 2009 and realized on rereading that this book has had a tremendous influence in my career. I don't think the term "DevOps" shows up anywhere in this book, but if you want to start bootstrapping a new developer into that way of thinking, Allspaw shows instead of telling what it means to pay attention to the operational side of house.

[Sanji · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book on where to get started in Web Services Capacity Planning

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good information about planning a large website's capacity needs based on pre-Yahoo Flickr's experiences.

[Viirak · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great inside of how Flickr grow

[Horacio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simple y al callo. Se lee mas como una serie de blogs semi independientes que como un libro. Punto de partida desde el cual se puede profundizar en varios temas segun el interes y la necesidad.

[Johan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent intro to capacity planning but I wish it would go deeper into the capacity planning process, challenges, patterns/anti-patterns etc. It's a bit too general.

[Clifton · Rating 4 out of 5]

excellent book for anyone doing capacity planning