Scalability

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.”

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.

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

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

Learn the tricks of the trade so you can build and architect applications that scale quickly--without all the high-priced headaches and service-level agreements associated with enterprise app servers and proprietary programming and database products. Culled from the experience of the Flickr.com lead developer, Building Scalable Web Sites offers techniques for creating fast sites that your visitors will find a pleasure to use.

Creating popular sites requires much more than fast hardware with lots of memory and hard drive space. It requires thinking about how to grow over time, how to make the same resources accessible to audiences with different expectations, and how to have a team of developers work on a site without creating new problems for visitors and for each other.

Presenting information to visitors from all over the world

Integrating email with your web applications

Planning hardware purchases and hosting options to have as much as you need without breaking your wallet

Partitioning and distributing databases to support large datasets and simultaneous transactions

Monitoring your applications to find and clear bottlenecks

* Providing services APIs and using services from other providers to increase your site's reach and capabilities

Whether you're starting a small web site with hopes of growing big or you already have a large system that needs maintenance, you'll find Building Scalable Web Sites to be a library of ideas for making things work.

As users come to depend on MySQL, they find that they have to deal with issues of reliability, scalability, and performance--issues that are not well documented but are critical to a smoothly functioning site. This book is an insider's guide to these little understood topics.Author Jeremy Zawodny has managed large numbers of MySQL servers for mission-critical work at Yahoo!, maintained years of contacts with the MySQL AB team, and presents regularly at conferences. Jeremy and Derek have spent months experimenting, interviewing major users of MySQL, talking to MySQL AB, benchmarking, and writing some of their own tools in order to produce the information in this book.In High Performance MySQL you will learn about MySQL indexing and optimization in depth so you can make better use of these key features. You will learn practical replication, backup, and load-balancing strategies with information that goes beyond available tools to discuss their effects in real-life environments. And you'll learn the supporting techniques you need to carry out these tasks, including advanced configuration, benchmarking, and investigating logs.Topics include:

• A review of configuration and setup options
• Storage engines and table types
• Benchmarking
• Indexes
• Query Optimization
• Application Design
• Server Performance
• Replication
• Load-balancing
• Backup and Recovery
• Security

From an industry insider--a close look at high-performance, end-to-end switching solutions
Load balancers are fast becoming an indispensable solution for handling the huge traffic demands of the Web. Their ability to solve a multitude of network and server bottlenecks in the Internet age ranges from dramatic improvements in server farm scalability to removing the firewall as a network bottleneck. This book provides a detailed, up-to-date, technical discussion of this fast-growing, multibillion dollar market, covering the full spectrum of topics--from server and firewall load balancing to transparent cache switching to global server load balancing. In the process, the author delivers insight into the way new technologies are deployed in network infrastructure and how they work. Written by an industry expert who hails from a leading Web switch vendor, this book will help network and server administrators improve the scalability, availability, manageability, and security of their servers, firewalls, caches, and Web sites.