The Art of Scalability


Book Description

The Comprehensive, Proven Approach to IT Scalability–Updated with New Strategies, Technologies, and Case Studies In The Art of Scalability, Second Edition, leading scalability consultants Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher cover everything you need to know to smoothly scale products and services for any requirement. This extensively revised edition reflects new technologies, strategies, and lessons, as well as new case studies from the authors’ pioneering consulting practice, AKF Partners. Writing for technical and nontechnical decision-makers, Abbott and Fisher cover everything that impacts scalability, including architecture, process, people, organization, and technology. Their insights and recommendations reflect more than thirty years of experience at companies ranging from eBay to Visa, and Salesforce.com to Apple. You’ll find updated strategies for structuring organizations to maximize agility and scalability, as well as new insights into the cloud (IaaS/PaaS) transition, NoSQL, DevOps, business metrics, and more. Using this guide’s tools and advice, you can systematically clear away obstacles to scalability–and achieve unprecedented IT and business performance. Coverage includes • Why scalability problems start with organizations and people, not technology, and what to do about it • Actionable lessons from real successes and failures • Staffing, structuring, and leading the agile, scalable organization • Scaling processes for hyper-growth environments • Architecting scalability: proprietary models for clarifying needs and making choices–including 15 key success principles • Emerging technologies and challenges: data cost, datacenter planning, cloud evolution, and customer-aligned monitoring • Measuring availability, capacity, load, and performance




The Art of Scalability


Book Description

A Comprehensive, Proven Approach to IT Scalability from Two Veteran Software, Technology, and Business Executives In The Art of Scalability, AKF Partners cofounders Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher cover everything IT and business leaders must know to build technology infrastructures that can scale smoothly to meet any business requirement. Drawing on their unparalleled experience managing some of the world’s highest-transaction-volume Web sites, the authors provide detailed models and best-practice approaches available in no other book. Unlike previous books on scalability, The Art of Scalability doesn’t limit its coverage to technology. Writing for both technical and nontechnical decision-makers, this book covers everything that impacts scalability, including architecture, processes, people, and organizations. Throughout, the authors address a broad spectrum of real-world challenges, from performance testing to IT governance. Using their tools and guidance, organizations can systematically overcome obstacles to scalability and achieve unprecedented levels of technical and business performance. Coverage includes Staffing the scalable organization: essential organizational, management, and leadership skills for technical leaders Building processes for scale: process lessons from hyper-growth companies, from technical issue resolution to crisis management Making better “build versus buy” decisions Architecting scalable solutions: powerful proprietary models for identifying scalability needs and choosing the best approaches to meet them Optimizing performance through caching, application and database splitting, and asynchronous design Scalability techniques for emerging technologies, including clouds and grids Planning for rapid data growth and new data centers Evolving monitoring strategies to tightly align with customer requirements




Scalability Rules


Book Description

50 Powerful, Easy-to-Use Rules for Supporting Hypergrowth in Any Environment Scalability Rules is the easy-to-use scalability primer and reference for every architect, developer, web professional, and manager. Authors Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher have helped scale more than 200 hypergrowth Internet sites through their consulting practice. Now, drawing on their unsurpassed experience, they present 50 clear, proven scalability rules—and practical guidance for applying them. Abbott and Fisher transform scalability from a “black art” to a set of realistic, technology-agnostic best practices for supporting hypergrowth in nearly any environment, including both frontend and backend systems. For architects, they offer powerful new insights for creating and evaluating designs. For developers, they share specific techniques for handling everything from databases to state. For managers, they provide invaluable help in goal-setting, decision-making, and interacting with technical teams. Whatever your role, you’ll find practical risk/benefit guidance for setting priorities—and getting maximum “bang for the buck.” • Simplifying architectures and avoiding “over-engineering” • Scaling via cloning, replication, separating functionality, and splitting data sets • Scaling out, not up • Getting more out of databases without compromising scalability • Avoiding unnecessary redirects and redundant double-checking • Using caches and content delivery networks more aggressively, without introducing unacceptable complexity • Designing for fault tolerance, graceful failure, and easy rollback • Striving for statelessness when you can; efficiently handling state when you must • Effectively utilizing asynchronous communication • Learning quickly from mistakes, and much more




Building Scalable Web Sites


Book Description

Building, scaling, and optimizing the next generation of Web applications.




Scaling Up Excellence


Book Description

Wall Street Journal Bestseller "The pick of 2014's management books." –Andrew Hill, Financial Times "One of the top business books of the year." –Harvey Schacter, The Globe and Mail Bestselling author, Robert Sutton and Stanford colleague, Huggy Rao tackle a challenge that determines every organization’s success: how to scale up farther, faster, and more effectively as an organization grows. Sutton and Rao have devoted much of the last decade to uncovering what it takes to build and uncover pockets of exemplary performance, to help spread them, and to keep recharging organizations with ever better work practices. Drawing on inside accounts and case studies and academic research from a wealth of industries-- including start-ups, pharmaceuticals, airlines, retail, financial services, high-tech, education, non-profits, government, and healthcare-- Sutton and Rao identify the key scaling challenges that confront every organization. They tackle the difficult trade-offs that organizations must make between whether to encourage individualized approaches tailored to local needs or to replicate the same practices and customs as an organization or program expands. They reveal how the best leaders and teams develop, spread, and instill the right mindsets in their people-- rather than ruining or watering down the very things that have fueled successful growth in the past. They unpack the principles that help to cascade excellence throughout an organization, as well as show how to eliminate destructive beliefs and behaviors that will hold them back. Scaling Up Excellence is the first major business book devoted to this universal and vexing challenge and it is destined to become the standard bearer in the field.




Scalability Rules


Book Description

Fully updated! Fifty Powerful, Easy-to-Use Rules for Supporting Hyper Growth “Whether you’re taking on a role as a technology leader in a new company or you simply want to make great technology decisions, Scalability Rules will be the go-to resource on your bookshelf.” –Chad Dickerson, CTO, Etsy Scalability Rules, Second Edition, is the easy-to-use scalability primer and reference for every architect, developer, network/software engineer, web professional, and manager. Authors Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher have helped scale hundreds of high-growth companies and thousands of systems. Drawing on their immense experience, they present 50 up-to-the-minute technical best practices for supporting hyper growth practically anywhere. Fully updated to reflect new technical trends and experiences, this edition is even easier to read, understand, and apply. Abbott and Fisher have also added powerful “stories behind the rules”: actual experiences and case studies from CTOs and technology executives at Etsy, NASDAQ, Salesforce, Shutterfly, Chegg, Warby Parker, Twitter, and other scalability pioneers. Architects will find powerful technology-agnostic insights for creating and evaluating designs. Developers will discover specific techniques for handling everything from databases to state. Managers will get invaluable help in setting goals, making decisions, and interacting with technical teams. Whatever your role, you’ll find practical risk/benefit guidance for setting priorities, translating plans into action, and gaining maximum scalability at minimum cost. You’ll learn how to Simplify architectures and avoid “over-engineering” Design scale into your solution, so you can scale on a just-in-time basis Make the most of cloning and replication Separate functionality and split data sets Scale out, not up Get more out of databases without compromising scalability Eliminate unnecessary redirects and redundant double-checking Use caches and CDNs more aggressively, without unacceptable complexity Design for fault tolerance, graceful failure, and easy rollback Emphasize statelessness, and efficiently handle state when you must Effectively utilize asynchronous communication Learn from your own mistakes and others’ high-profile failures Prioritize your actions to get the biggest “bang for the buck”




The Art of Capacity Planning


Book 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.




Scalability Patterns


Book Description

In this book, the CEO of Cazton, Inc. and internationally-acclaimed speaker, Chander Dhall, demonstrates current website design scalability patterns and takes a pragmatic approach to explaining their pros and cons to show you how to select the appropriate pattern for your site. He then tests the patterns by deliberately forcing them to fail and exposing potential flaws before discussing how to design the optimal pattern to match your scale requirements. The author explains the use of polyglot programming and how to match the right patterns to your business needs. He also details several No-SQL patterns and explains the fundamentals of different paradigms of No-SQL by showing complementary strategies of using them along with relational databases to achieve the best results. He also teaches how to make the scalability pattern work with a real-world microservices pattern. With the proliferation of countless electronic devices and the ever growing number of Internet users, the scalability of websites has become an increasingly important challenge. Scalability, even though highly coveted, may not be so easy to achieve. Think that you can't attain responsiveness along with scalability? Chander Dhall will demonstrate that, in fact, they go hand in hand. What You'll Learn Architect and develop applications so that they are easy to scale. Learn different scaling and partitioning options and the combinations. Learn techniques to speed up responsiveness. Deep dive into caching, column-family databases, document databases, search engines and RDBMS. Learn scalability and responsiveness concepts that are usually ignored. Effectively balance scalability, performance, responsiveness, and availability while minimizing downtime. Who This Book Is For Executives (CXOs), software architects , developers, and IT Pros




The Art of Application Performance Testing


Book Description

This practical book provides a step-by-step approach to testing mission-critical applications for scalability and performance before they're deployed -- a vital topic to which other books devote one chapter, if that. Businesses today live and die by network applications and web services. Because of the increasing complexity of these programs, and the pressure to deploy them quickly, many professionals don't take the time to ensure that they'll perform well and scale effectively. The Art of Application Performance Testing explains the complete life cycle of the testing process, and demonstrates best practices to help you plan, gain approval for, coordinate, and conduct performance tests on your applications. With this book, you'll learn to: Set realistic performance testing goals Implement an effective application performance testing strategy Interpret performance test results Cope with different application technologies and architectures Use automated performance testing tools Test traditional local applications, web-based applications, and web services (SOAs) Recognize and resolves issues that are often overlooked in performance tests Written by a consultant with 30 years of experience in the IT industry and over 12 years experience with performance testing, this easy-to-read book is illustrated with real-world examples and packed with practical advice. The Art of Application Performance Testing thoroughly explains the pitfalls of an inadequate testing strategy and offers you a robust, structured approach for ensuring that your applications perform well and scale effectively when the need arises. "Ian has maintained a vendor-agnostic methodology beautifully in this material. The metrics and graphs, along with background information provided in his case studies, eloquently convey to the reader, 'Methodology above all, tools at your discretion...' Ian's expertise shines through throughout the entire reading experience."-- Matt St. Onge, Enterprise Solution Architect, HCL Technologies America / Teradyne




The Art of Support


Book Description

Are you a customer success or support executive curious about adapting industry best practices to your organization? Are you a newly-promoted customer success or support manager with plenty of ideas, but not much management experience? Or are you an executive with no hands-on experience with customer success, but wanting to learn more about how to decrease churn and improve revenue expansion from existing customers? The Art of Support is a practical guide for managers and executives that answers your questions. In it, you will find: - Best practices for customer success and support, from designing customer lifecycle journeys, to managing day-to-day activities, to measuring results. - Nuanced recommendations to build or improve your organization. - Dozens of practical tools you can use right away such as customer scorecards, sample support portfolios, hiring checklists, decision trees for selecting support models, job ladders, and budget templates.