Guerrilla Capacity Planning: A Tactical Approach to Planning for Highly Scalable Applications and Services

by Neil J. Gunther

Under today’s shortened fiscal horizons and contracted time-to-market schedules, traditional approaches to capacity planning are seen by management as inflating production schedules. In the face of relentless pressure to get things done faster, this book facilitates rapid forecasting of capacity requirements, based on opportunistic use of available performance data and tools so that management insight is expanded but production schedules are not. The book introduces such concepts as an iterative cycle of improvement called "The Wheel of Capacity Planning," and Virtual Load Testing, which provides a highly cost-effective method for assessing application scalability.

Genres: Technology, Management, Computers

273 pages, Hardcover

First published December 19, 2006

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good content and the overall principles. Easily applicable and has a good guide on getting started.

On the downside, I thought the book was:
- targeted at people that read Analyzing Computer System Performance with Perl::PDQ
- had somewhat of a high amount of "filler" content
- went in depth explaining some concepts of queuing theory from zero, but used and didn't explain other concepts at all.

I'll probably going to re-read certain parts later.

[Tim Nowotny · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the few books that go into capacity planning.
First minus was it not making clear that it will go only into IT capacities; there is a whole other world out there. Second minus was that despite the author saying that it is more of a tactical approach I could find no triggers or discussion trees to start the process.
On the pro side it is a light read.

[Austin Murphy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was hoping for some insight, but I lost interest half way through and gave up. I'm not 100% sure, but I think it was more hype and unnecessary math than actual take-home insight into scaling ones servers.

[Leandro López · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're going to actually perform capacity planning, then this book is a must, as it has theory and formulas you can use. If you are only interested in knowing about capacity planning then this book will be way over your head.