Books

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 More info →

A web application involves many specialists, but it takes people in web ops to ensure that everything works together throughout an application's lifetime. It's the expertise you need when your start-up gets an unexpected spike in web traffic, or when a new feature causes your mature application to fail. In this collection of essays and interviews, web veterans such as Theo Schlossnagle, Baron Schwartz, and Alistair Croll offer insights into this evolving field. You'll learn stories from the trenches--from builders of some of the biggest sites on the Web--on what's necessary to help a site thrive.

• Learn the skills needed in web operations, and why they're gained through experience rather than schooling
• Understand why it's important to gather metrics from both your application and infrastructure
• Consider common approaches to database architectures and the pitfalls that come with increasing scale
• Learn how to handle the human side of outages and degradations
• Find out how one company avoided disaster after a huge traffic deluge
• Discover what went wrong after a problem occurs, and how to prevent it from happening again
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Whether it's in Java, .NET, or Ruby on Rails, getting your application ready to ship is only half the battle. Did you design your system to survivef a sudden rush of visitors from Digg or Slashdot? Or an influx of real world customers from 100 different countries? Are you ready for a world filled with flakey networks, tangled databases, and impatient users?

If you're a developer and don't want to be on call for 3AM for the rest of your life, this book will help.

In Release It!, Michael T. Nygard shows you how to design and architect your application for the harsh realities it will face. You'll learn how to design your application for maximum uptime, performance, and return on investment.

Mike explains that many problems with systems today start with the design.

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This is your fast guide to getting started and getting inside the Lighttpd web server. Written from a developer's perspective, this book helps you understand Lighttpd, and get it set up as securely and quickly as possible. This book is for System Administrators or Web Developers seeking a lean deployment platform for web applications or who want to switch to a "lighter" web server than Apache.

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As a developer, you are aware of the increasing concern amongst developers and site architects that websites be able to handle the vast number of visitors that flood the Internet on a daily basis. Scalable Internet Architectures addresses these concerns by teaching you both good and bad design methodologies for building new sites and how to scale existing websites to robust, high-availability websites. Primarily example-based, the book discusses major topics in web architectural design, presenting existing solutions and how they work. Technology budget tight? This book will work for you, too, as it introduces new and innovative concepts to solving traditionally expensive problems without a large technology budget. Using open source and proprietary examples, you will be engaged in best practice design methodologies for building new sites, as well as appropriately scaling both growing and shrinking sites. Website development help has arrived in the form of Scalable Internet Architectures.

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This book is a practical real-world tutorial covering everything you need to know about Amazon SimpleDB. You will come across examples in three languages: Java, PHP, and Python. This book is aimed at transforming you from a beginner to an advanced developer. If you are a developer wanting to build scalable web-based database applications using SimpleDB, then this book is for you. You do not need to know anything about SimpleDB to read and learn from this book, and no basic knowledge is strictly necessary. This guide will help you to start from scratch and build advanced applications.

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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.

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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

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As one of today's cloud computing services, Google App Engine does more than provide access to a large system of servers. It also offers you a simple model for building applications that scale automatically to accommodate millions of users. With Programming Google App Engine, you'll get expert practical guidance that will help you make the best use of this powerful platform. Google engineer Dan Sanderson shows you how to design your applications for scalability, including ways to perform common development tasks using App Engine's APIs and scalable services.

You'll learn about App Engine's application server architecture, runtime environments, and scalable datastore for distributing data, as well as techniques for optimizing your application. App Engine offers nearly unlimited computing power, and this book provides clear and concise instructions for getting the most from it right from the source.

• Discover the differences between traditional web development and development with App Engine
• Learn the details of App Engine's Python and Java runtime environments
• Understand how App Engine handles web requests and executes application code
• Learn how to use App Engine's scalable datastore, including queries and indexes, transactions, and data modeling
• Use task queues to parallelize and distribute work across the infrastructure
• Deploy and manage applications with ease

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Architects look at thousands of buildings during their training, and study critiques of those buildings written by masters. In contrast, most software developers only ever get to know a handful of large programs well - usually programs they wrote themselves - and never study the great programs of history. As a result, they repeat one another's mistakes rather than building on one another's successes. This book's goal is to change that. In it, the authors of twenty-five open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program's major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development? In answering these questions, the contributors to this book provide unique insights into how they think.

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While the REST design philosophy has captured the imagination of web and enterprise developers alike, using this approach to develop real web services is no picnic. This cookbook includes more than 100 recipes to help you take advantage of REST, HTTP, and the infrastructure of the Web. You'll learn ways to design RESTful web services for client and server applications that meet performance, scalability, reliability, and security goals, no matter what programming language and development framework you use.

Each recipe includes one or two problem statements, with easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions for solving them, as well as examples using HTTP requests and responses, and XML, JSON, and Atom snippets. You'll also get implementation guidelines, and a discussion of the pros, cons, and trade-offs that come with each solution.

• Learn how to design resources to meet various application scenarios
• Successfully design representations and URIs
• Implement the hypertext constraint using links and link headers
• Understand when and how to use Atom and AtomPub
• Know what and what not to do to support caching
• Learn how to implement concurrency control
• Deal with advanced use cases involving copying, merging, transactions, batch processing, and partial updates
• Secure web services and support OAuth

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This volume of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series contains the papers accepted for presentation at the Third International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure Management and Security (AIMS 2009). The conference took place in Enschede, The Netherlands, hosted by the University of Twente. AIMS 2009 was organized and supported by the EC IST-EMANICS Network of Excellence (#26854) and co-sponsored by IFIP WG 6.6 and the Strategic Research Orientation of the University of Twente on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN). AIMS 2009 constituted the Third edition of a single-track and standalone c- ference on management and security aspects of distributed and autonomous systems, which took place initially in Oslo, Norway in June 2007, followed by AIMS 2008 in Bremen, Germany. The theme of the AIMS 2009 conference was “Scalability of Networks and Services,” focusing on how scalable networked systems can be monitored, managed, and protected in an ef cient and autonomous way. The research papers that have been selected for publication in the present proceedings have approached this theme from different perspectives, covering topics such as network resource management, overlays and peer-to-peer networks, network configuration and optimization,and monitoring and visualization.

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