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| The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources | 
 enlarge | Author: John Allspaw
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $44.99
Buy New: $27.97
You Save: $17.02 (38%)
New (35) Used (5) from $27.97
Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 289150
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 152
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.9 x 0.5
ISBN: 0596518579
Dewey Decimal Number: 005
EAN: 9780596518578
ASIN: 0596518579
Publication Date: September 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 Great Overview of Capacity Planning November 18, 2008
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 October 20, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
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 October 18, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
Chock full o' takeaways October 17, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Right out of the gate, John covers a topic near and dear to my heart: metrics. His advice? "Measure, measure, measure." John reinforces this by including an incredible number of charts throughout the book. He goes on to say that our measurement tools need to provide an easy way to:
* Record and store data over time
* Build custom metrics
* Compare metrics from various sources
* Import and export metrics
As I read the book, I found myself nodding and thinking, "yes, yes, this is exactly what I learned!" Although it's been more than five years since I was buildmaster for My Yahoo!, I really resonated with the advice John provides, like this one: "Homogenize hardware to halt headaches". (You have to love the alliteration, too.)
In a thin book that's easy to read, John covers a large number of topics. He talks about load testing, with pointers to tools like Httperf and Siege. There are several sections that talk about caching architectures and the use of Squid. He provides guidelines when it comes to deployment, such as making all changes happen in one place, the importance of defining roles and services, and ensuring new servers start working automatically. At the end he even manages to cover virtualization and cloud computing, and how they come into play during capacity planning.
The Art of Capacity Planning is full of sage advice from a seasoned veteran, like this one: "The moral of this little story? When faced with the question of capacity, try to ignore those urges to make existing gear faster, and focus instead on the topic at hand: finding out what you need, and when." When I read a technical book, I'm really looking for takeaways. That's why I loved The Art of Capacity Planning, and I think you will, too.
A complex art distilled October 16, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
John Allspaw has done something that very few of his peers would have been able to do. He has taken a black art, Capacity Planning, and he turned it in to a series of steps that anyone can follow.
The book is filled with common case studies, for how to plan capacity for things like web server farms, database clusters, and caching layers. The real value is in watching how the author applies the same formula in each case, giving Systems Administrators and Executives the tools they need to do a better job of capacity planning in their own unique infrastructures.
As the earlier review says, it's a short book. In my opinion, that's a good thing: it's goal is to teach you how to perform capacity planning in any environment. If it was longer, it would have been full of more examples, which would likely only serve to lead the reader away from the core principles. You need to learn *how* to capacity plan an infrastructure, not get pat (and often incorrect) advice on how to measure your web farm.
The discussion on curve fitting and trend prediction is worth it alone - I'm aware of no other book on the topic that shows so clearly how to examine your data in service of capacity planning.
It's the process I'll follow from now on.
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