The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources

by John Allspaw

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 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.

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

152 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.

[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.

[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.

[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