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John Allspaw
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The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources 1st Edition

by John Allspaw (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 32 ratings
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There is a newer edition of this item:

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

Previous page
  1. ISBN-10
    0596518579
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0596518578
  3. Edition
    1st
  4. Publisher
    O'Reilly Media
  5. Publication date
    October 28, 2008
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    7.09 x 0.34 x 9.21 inches
  8. Print length
    152 pages
  9. See all details
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Amazon First Reads | Editors' picks at exclusive prices

Editorial Reviews

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.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (October 28, 2008)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 152 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0596518579
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0596518578
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.09 x 0.34 x 9.21 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 32 ratings

About the author

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John Allspaw

John Allspaw

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John has worked in systems operations for over fourteen years in biotech, government and online media. He started out tuning parallel clusters running vehicle crash simulations for the U.S. government, and then moved on to the Internet in 1997. He built the backing infrastr at Salon.com, InfoWorld.com, Friendster, and Flickr. He is now Chief Technology Officer at Etsy, and is the author of "The Art of Capacity Planning" and "Web Operations" published by O'Reilly. He speaks from time to time at conferences on topics related to web operations, operations and development culture, infrastructure, and human factors and systems safety.

He's a dad, guitarist, engineer, and always trying.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
32 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

AmazonBuyer
5.0 out of 5 stars A classical treatise about capacity planning
Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2011
Verified Purchase
John Allspaw's book is a classical treatise about capacity planning. It is a valuable asset to all web services professionals. John's lucid style of coupling statistical concepts to the capacity planning (and prediction) practice makes the book very special. The book is methodically organized, in that it takes the reader gradually from a generic view of a capacity planning project to the specifics of the measurement, monitoring and forecasting of web traffic. The book also has a valuable source of information about various statistical tools that help in analysis, design and upgrading of the capacity of web sites. The author's awesome presentation (using mathematical statistics) of all the steps involved (a) in the measurement of current traffic metrics and (b) in forecasting the capacity of a web site, deserves a special word of praise. In summary, I would recommend this book to all professionals involved in the building and maintenance of the web infrastructure, for a business.
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christina
5.0 out of 5 stars great book on capacity planning for a web service
Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2015
Verified Purchase
I normally cannot read through instructional books but this one was easy to read and follow. This gives you a great basic knowledge of how to approach capacity planning for a web service. I have read it at least 3 times at this point and continue to reference it often.

The one disappointing thing was that I was unable to figure out how to access the code online, but honestly you do not need it. Just would have been nice to see it.
One person found this helpful
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Michael Schenck
5.0 out of 5 stars From Scalible to progression planning
Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2010
Verified Purchase
This book is fantastic! It's a very easy read, keeps you engaged and is full of excellent advise for all stages. Architectural planning, monitoring, trending, and utilizing public clouds for your occasional peak cycles.

I can't recommend this enough, my team at work is now reading this and our conversations have changed for the better.
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Mark Ruzomberka
4.0 out of 5 stars John's examples are just like Charlie's from the TV show Numb3rs
Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2009
This is the first book on capacity planning I have read so I have nothing substantial to compare it too at this time. John's descriptions and real world examples are great.

While I was reading I felt John's analogies were very similar to the way the character Charlie from TV's "Numb3rs" explains something very complicated with a real world examples. I liked the examples of the Bacon Delivery truck and the Super-market checkout especially to visualize what was going on in the process of the servers.

One huge take away was the level of importance tying application metrics and server metrics back to financial costs. SLA's don't really matter if the cost of adding another 9 to the 99.999's type model is more expensive than your client is paying you for the whole contract. In essence don't promise 99.9% over 99.0 percent if the .9 improvement will cost $10,000 in additional hardware and the contract is only worth $10,000. Many would argue but it is only a 9/10ths of a percent improvement how big of a deal can it be? Remember the first 1% of keeping up a server is not the same as the last 1%.

The chapter on regression and line fitting was mostly a refresher. The chapters on cloud computing were excellent as real world examples are always useful for me. I also liked the fact he referred to flickr a lot, so there was a sense of walking the path vs. knowing the path.

Some co-workers did joke that they must not know what they are doing because the seats are all empty on the cover. I'd be curious to see if the same book sold better with the same cover and seats filled. Other comments criticize the book for being only 150 pages but I would rather have 150 good pages than 300 bad pages any day of the week. Also the author explains the smallish size in the preface.

All in all a great quick read that cut to the details and made me feel more confident I could bridge the gap between business and IT in a short amount of time.
2 people found this helpful
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Nils Valentin
3.0 out of 5 stars Lightweight Overview of CP Process
Reviewed in the United States on October 9, 2008
Capacity planning is one of those areas where not many books are published yet.

One reason might be that it's a complex task. You need the right mixture between a certain practical approach, measuring the right system parameters, putting them into meaningful context, making educated guesses and doing the right maths.

The author(s) shows in his book examples on how to gracefully plan extending your server farm. Examples show how to find the limites of your web, cache, DB, storage or image processing server and how to mitigate or live with them.

As you can see the book is trying to cover a lot of ground.
Its also going into discussions on curve fitting and trend prediction.
Its even going into a description of cloud computing in the appendix.
Overall the author(s) trys to give many useful advice on a sitenote which actually deserve more detailed exploration.

The fact of the books "diet" from the originally announced 300 to only 150 pages doesn't work for its advantage. A few more case study scenarios or more detailed instruction like tutorials would have proven useful.

So its mostly up to the reader to exercise and follow up on the author(s) intentions.
That's also what will make the mileage vary for many readers.

Unfortunately, I got the impression that the book is rushed to the marcet.
F.e. the search index contains no page numbers.

For the PDF version I thought the Images are at times difficult to read.
When opening the PDF on Linux you might find the images are not displayed correctly.

The book serves as an extension to the public session "Capacity Planning" which you might have seen on the Velocity Event on 23rd/24th June in Burlingame.
h**p://en.oreilly.com/velocity2008/public/schedule/detail/3208

The compact book is split into two major parts.

The Main Body - 110 pages
The Appendix - 22 pages

Summary:

The overall idea of this compact book is sound.
It covers topics that hasn't been explained anywhere before.
The wide coverage of the book is a blessing and a curse at the same time.

On the one side there are a real gems hidden in the text, especially in the 20+ page appendix which is even going into cloud computing.
On the other side the author(s) do give many useful advice on a sitenote which actually deserve more detailed exploration.
That's why, the book needs to major to a second edition to really bring out the author(s) original intention in full.

As of now (1st edition) the book does serve as a lightweight overview of CP for consultants and managers. From a system engineers point of view I feel the book should have delivered more on how to perform capacity planning.
8 people found this helpful
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David Heiser
5.0 out of 5 stars It really gives a high overview on what you need ...
Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2015
Verified Purchase
It really gives a high overview on what you need think about and plan so that your prepared on how to tackle any situation when it comes to capacity planning.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Ace under the sleve.
Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2017
Verified Purchase
great tool for Capacity Planning
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Mauricio Bermudez
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on September 18, 2015
Verified Purchase
a must for anyone in capacity
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Top reviews from other countries

Ed
5.0 out of 5 stars Simple, concise and honest practicality explained well
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 12, 2014
Verified Purchase
It's a small paperback but Ullyssian in importance.
A good reference to any questions arising when your business friends do drive-bys at your desk and tell you they've just released something to your site that some coder-in-a-cupboard-you-don't-know-about spent the last week on and uses APIs that may, or may not be under sudden load as a result.
Would highly recommend.
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Simon Rowland
5.0 out of 5 stars Informative and practical.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 10, 2010
Verified Purchase
The Art Of Capacity planning is an excellent summary of the subject. It is also very practical, I have tried many of the techniques it recommends and found all of them really useful.
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