The Art of Capacity Planning

Scaling Web Resources in the Cloud

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