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, with many techniques and considerations to help you plan, deploy, and manage web application infrastructure. The Art of Capacity Planning is written by the manager of data operations for the world-famous photo-sharing site Flickr.com, now owned by Yahoo! John Allspaw combines personal anecdotes from many phases of Flickr's growth with insights from his colleagues in many other industries to give you solid guidelines for measuring your growth, predicting trends, and making cost-effective preparations. Topics include:

• Evaluating tools for measurement and deployment

• Capacity analysis and prediction for storage, database, and application servers

• Designing architectures to easily add and measure capacity

• Handling sudden spikes

• Predicting exponential and explosive growth

• How cloud services such as EC2 can fit into a capacity strategy

In this book, Allspaw draws on years of valuable 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. The advice he offers in The Art of Capacity Planning will not only help you prepare for explosive growth, it will save you tons of grief.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 9 Ratings

An Approachable Treatment of a Complex Subject - 2008-10-20
Reviewer Rating:
The "Art" is an approachable treatment of a complex field of operations: capacity planning for high-traffic websites. Allspaw leverages his Flickr experience to give us a window into web operations as done by the pros.

The book keeps the high-level perspective necessary to give useful advice in a messy field, without getting lost in minutiae that would be specific to a given site. The author goes over the hows and whys of planning your capacity and the process needed to maintain it as traffic grows, with interesting insights such as designing for measurement (i.e. not mixing separate components of the architecture on the same machine in ways that hinders measurement of actual capacity), how to place a procurement process in place, and the ever-present point of presenting your data convincingly to the business owners that write the checks.

Allspaw places the emphasis on the right places, and does so in a concise manner: at less than 150 pages, this book packs a lot of meat for its pages, and as a fan of brevity the point did not go unnoticed on me. This is one of the best titles to come out of O'Reilly in the last few months, a must-have for your technical library if you work in the field.

Good introduction to Capacity Planning for Web Operations - 2009-03-16
Reviewer Rating:
The Art of Capacity Planning is a good introduction to Capacity Planning for Web Operations that touches on the following topics:
* Why do you need capacity planning?
* What information should you gather for capacity planning and how?
* How to predict trends for your web applications?
* How and when to procure new hardware?
* How to create a sustainable capacity planning process?

As the author mentions in the preface, the book has a lot of common sense material. Most experienced enterprise web operations architects should be familiar with this material. But, it is refreshing to see this urban wisdom captured and printed in a book format. The book is unique in that it is not meticulously organized and illustrated like a text book or a reference guide. It provides a smattering of anecdotes, examples, gotchas, and tools from the author's experience in a rapidly growing start up environment at Flickr.

I am looking forward to a second edition of the book where the author can delve deeper into some missing aspects that are critical to capacity planning like log analysis and performance improvements. Enterprise web operations folks who are familiar with commercial tools like Sitescope, OpenView, Opsware, Gomez, etc. rather than free/open source tools and who manage a large number of diverse applications might have a learning curve to relate the examples in the book to their environment.

John's examples are just like Charlie's from the TV show Numb3rs - 2009-03-13
Reviewer Rating:
This is the first book on capacity planning I have read so I have nothing substantial to compare it too at this time. John's descriptions and real world examples are great.

While I was reading I felt John's analogies were very similar to the way the character Charlie from TV's "Numb3rs" explains something very complicated with a real world examples. I liked the examples of the Bacon Delivery truck and the Super-market checkout especially to visualize what was going on in the process of the servers.

One huge take away was the level of importance tying application metrics and server metrics back to financial costs. SLA's don't really matter if the cost of adding another 9 to the 99.999's type model is more expensive than your client is paying you for the whole contract. In essence don't promise 99.9% over 99.0 percent if the .9 improvement will cost $10,000 in additional hardware and the contract is only worth $10,000. Many would argue but it is only a 9/10ths of a percent improvement how big of a deal can it be? Remember the first 1% of keeping up a server is not the same as the last 1%.

The chapter on regression and line fitting was mostly a refresher. The chapters on cloud computing were excellent as real world examples are always useful for me. I also liked the fact he referred to flickr a lot, so there was a sense of walking the path vs. knowing the path.

Some co-workers did joke that they must not know what they are doing because the seats are all empty on the cover. I'd be curious to see if the same book sold better with the same cover and seats filled. Other comments criticize the book for being only 150 pages but I would rather have 150 good pages than 300 bad pages any day of the week. Also the author explains the smallish size in the preface.

All in all a great quick read that cut to the details and made me feel more confident I could bridge the gap between business and IT in a short amount of time.

Print Size - 2009-08-30
Reviewer Rating:
Great content. The size of the print is so small it distracts from reading the text. [...] you should be able to read the damn book easily. Is O'Reilly conducting a Dilbert-ish shrinking page count experiment?

Great Overview of Capacity Planning - 2008-11-18
Reviewer Rating:
John Allspaw brings a great deal of his experience with Flickr to this book and that makes it a five-star read in my view. Whether you are just getting started with capacity planning or a seasoned veteran, this book provides a critical overview of the fundamentals to ensure you're on the right path. That it also includes discussions on monitoring software and other practical tips is just a bonus. I wish I'd had this book available ten years ago but am glad it is out there now and hope it encourages others to share their experience as well.

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