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 Architecture 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 Architecture.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 17 Ratings

A worthwhile read, a disappointing experience - 2009-03-31
Reviewer Rating:
First and foremost, chapter 10 should be an Appendix. This was a horrible ending to what seemed to be a promising discussion on horizontal scaling for any system/network engineer or astute systems engineer.

Clear and concise, then incoherent and grammatically challenged, this book requires constant read backs leaving the reader with a sense of a diminished level of reading comprehension.

Fortunately there are some very good real world discussions on horizontal scaling, distributed caching, and eliminating single points of failure in your design.

Unfortunately the book was a long documentary on the author's Spread utility/program/solution and the last chapter is dedicated to writing a module for Spread. Completely out of band with regards to actual high performance clustered environments where the author's solution is likely scarce in popularity.

I do appreciate his coverage of logging. Despite my rating, I don't regret the first nine chapters.

Execlent for understanding the issues with scaling a web site - 2009-09-29
Reviewer Rating:
An excellent book on what the issues are with building web site that scale to large numbers of servers. Written more for a programmer than a systems administrator but not to heavy on the programming side to bog it down. It is really good about organizing the different aspects of scalability and explaining important concepts. For example the difference between caching static content and caching data used in generating a web page. An excellent read. not too long, not too much detail. It made me think about web sites and clustering in a new way

Execllent for understanding the issues with scaling a web site - 2009-09-29
Reviewer Rating:
An excellent book on what the issues are with building web site that scale to large numbers of servers. Written more for a programmer than a systems administrator but not to heavy on the programming side to bog it down. It is really good about organizing the different aspects of scalability and explaining important concepts. For example the difference between caching static content and caching data used in generating a web page. An excellent read. not too long, not too much detail. It made me think about web sites and clustering in a new way.

Towards automatic, self-managed operations - 2009-09-19
Reviewer Rating:
I bought this book on recommendations from others and I have to agree that it is fantastic. Don't let the 2006 publication date fool you into avoiding it for something more current. The advise given is based on real experience gained initially during the dot com era but it is as relevant today as then. The best part of the book is its advocacy and practical examples of the Spread group communications toolkit. Why solve a problem with a vendor's expensive high performance single point of failure solution when well knowledgeable use of internet infrastructure and peer to peer communication better solves it. Plus, you have a powerful tool to aid you moving further towards automatic, self-managed operations.

Useful info - 2009-03-12
Reviewer Rating:
The author has clearly been through the Internet grinder and we're now all the better for it. Scalability of an Internet service should be one of the chief considerations in its design and he relates the strategies well. His experience definitely mirrors some of my own observations (and mistakes) in the past.

Browse Similar Topics

Top Level Categories:
Internet/Online

Sub-Categories:
Internet/Online > Usability