The Art of Capacity Planning

by Allspaw, John

• ISBN13: 9780596518578
• ISBN10: 0596518579
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-09-01
• Publisher: Oreilly & Associates Inc

Summary

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, as it discusses the many techniques and considerations needed to plan, deploy, and manage infrastructure for a growing web application. "The Art of Capacity Planning" is written by the manager of data operations for the world-famous photo-sharing site Flickr.com (owned by Yahoo!).John Allspaw draws on years of 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.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Goals, Issues, and Processes in Capacity Planning	p. 1
Quick and Dirty Math	p. 3
Predicting When Your Systems Will Fail	p. 3
Make Your System Stats Tell Stories	p. 4
Buying Stuff: Procurement Is a Process	p. 6
Performance and Capacity: Two Different Animals	p. 6
The Effects of Social Websites and Open APIs	p. 8
Setting Goals for Capacity	p. 11
Different Kinds of Requirements and Measurements	p. 12
Architecture Decisions	p. 15
Measurement: Units of Capacity	p. 23
Aspects of Capacity Tracking Tools	p. 24
Applications of Monitoring	p. 31
API Usage and Its Effect on Capacity	p. 59
Examples and Reality	p. 60
Summary	p. 61
Predicting Trends	p. 63
Riding Your Waves	p. 64
Procurement	p. 80
The Effects of Increasing Capacity	p. 83
Long-Term Trends	p. 84
Iteration and Calibration	p. 88
Summary	p. 90
Deployment	p. 93
Automated Deployment Philosophies	p. 93
Automated Installation Tools	p. 96
Automated Configuration	p. 98
Summary	p. 103
Virtualization and Cloud Computing	p. 105
Dealing with Instantaneous Growth	p. 121
Capacity Tools	p. 127
Index	p. 131
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