This is the Safari online edition of the printed book.

A Comprehensive, Proven Approach to IT Scalability from Two Veteran Software, Technology, and Business Executives

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

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 6 Ratings

Technical scalability is only a part of organizational scalability -- know all about it! - 2010-01-10
Reviewer Rating:
Imagine a highly scalable architecture of a successful ecommerce company.
If you visualize distributed data centers, content distribution networks,
Brewers CAP theorem etc you have only half of the scalability story.
This book tells the whole story of organizational scalability of which
technical scalability is only a part. Consider some examples like how do
you perform reliable change management of a vast infrastructure to
maintain business continuity or what should be the model for unambiguous
responsibility-accountibility in a scalable organization.

I have worked in a critical scalability project of PayPal.com and can vouch
that this book is a gem.

Practical, broad ranging, comprehensive overview of the field - 2010-01-27
Reviewer Rating:
The Art of Scalability provides a broad ranging, comprehensive overview of the considerations required to address the challenges of increasing requirements for larger, faster, reliable, and yet low cost Internet applications. The book does not only consider the technical details and conceptual frameworks required to develop a scalable and available site, but also addresses the often over looked human aspects. Covered are topics related to how to define roles, find, train, manage, measure, and grow team members that support the applications and infrastructure. Organizational considerations including comparison of various organzitional strategies are discussed. The book covers high level conceptualizations of the architectural and design strategies and models that have proved successful in use at several well known companies. While it would be interesting to dig deeper into the technical details for many readers, this book is extraordinally well suited to technical managers, architects, leaders, and executives that must appreciate the key concepts and strategies of highly available and highly scalable systems. And while not deeply technical, it provides the hands on architect, developer, or systems administator crucial design goals and strategies that should be considered in the day-to-day requirements, architecture, design, implement, and operate cycle of Internet applications. An excellent read for every technical architect, designer, developer, manager, executive, and leader in organziations that must successfully implement and manage large scale systems.

Good points, but sub-optimal approach - 2010-01-17
Reviewer Rating:
This book is good from an HR / management perspective on scalability. I wish the authors had been more technical (and by that I mean less "qualitative" and more statistical) in their approach (even though I agree there can be no "one size fits all" solution to this problem). There are instances in the book where the authors mention that while a team of 1 can produce 1 unit of work, a team of 2 can produce only 1.99 units of work, an assertion which makes about as much sense in the real world as a unicorn. I am sorry if I am coming across as being very negative, because there are some very strong points in this book which are worth considering. However, my grievance (as an engineer) is that it is not for a techie who wants to create a scalable company (aka Brinn/Page or Zuckerburg), but instead is for a management grad who wants to manage a tech company. I wish there were more books available for the former, than the latter.

Read this before you need it - 2010-01-14
Reviewer Rating:
This is not your typical tech book. It's an unusual mix of lessons learned on both deep technical issues, as well as broad business and people management topics.

One of the most difficult challenges in the Internet era is "surviving success." You may think this is a good problem to have, but that's little consolation if your company goes under because you couldn't scale your business or your software. If you've come up with something promising, and your business is off to a good start, then I can only hope you don't read this too late.

These guys have "been there and done that" at some of the most successful companies of our time, and they are giving back by sharing what they've learned. Very few people on the planet have the experience they do, and this is one of the most important, practical, actionable and relevant books for those of us in the business of running commercial Internet-based businesses.

Condensed real-world experience - 2010-01-12
Reviewer Rating:

When a web site is down, sometimes they'll call someone like me to figure out whether or not it's a denial-of-service attack (my money's on "no"). Then, when they realize their systems just can't handle their newfound popularity, they'll call a scalability expert, of which Marty and Fish are among the best of the best. If you're running a high-transaction-volume technology operation, particularly a website, this is stuff you need to know.

Many of us who worked for Tom, Marty, & Fish at eBay / PayPal during times of extreme and rapid growth learned a lot of this stuff from our own experience, but for me the book was a nice refresher course, and also covered some areas where I had less personal experience in sufficient depth that I was able to fill in some gaps.

When pressed for time, it's going to be great to be able to tell someone to go buy this book rather than try to explain all the things they're going to need to do to scale their technology organization and their website operation.

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