The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources in the Cloud, 2nd Edition

In their early days, Twitter, Flickr, Etsy, and many other companies experienced sudden spikes in activity that took their web services down in minutes. Today, determining how much capacity you need for handling traffic surges is still a common frustration of operations engineers and software developers. This hands-on guide provides the knowledge and tools you need to measure, deploy, and manage your web application infrastructure before you experience explosive growth.

In this thoroughly updated edition, authors Arun Kejariwal (MZ) and John Allspaw provide a systematic, robust, and practical approach to capacity planning—rather than theoretical models—based on their own experiences and those of many colleagues in the industry. They address the vast sea change in web operations, especially cloud computing.

• Understand issues that arise on heavily trafficked websites or mobile apps
• Explore how capacity fits into web/mobile app availability and performance
• Use tools for measuring and monitoring computer performance and usage
• Turn measurement data into robust forecasts and learn how trending fits into the planning process
• Examine related deployment concepts: installation, configuration, and management automation
• Learn how cloud autoscaling enables you to scale your app’s capacity up or down

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Goals, Issues, and Processes in Capacity Planning
Chapter 2. Setting Goals for Capacity
Chapter 3. Measurement: Units of Capacity
Chapter 4. Predicting Trends
Chapter 5. Deployment
Chapter 6. Predicting Trends
Chapter 7. Deployment
Chapter 8. Autoscaling
Appendix A Virtualization
Appendix B Dealing with Instantaneous Growth
Appendix C Capacity Tools