Cloud Computing and The Art of Capacity Planning

Update:
Kathryn (Sr. Publicist @ O'Reilly) responded quickly to my email and will be sending over the hardcopy to me by snailmail. Expect a review soon.


I will ask for a copy and will try to go through it and do a review later.

"One of my frustrations as an operations engineering manager was not having somewhere to turn to help me figure out how much equipment we'd need to keep running. Existing books on the topic of computer capacity planning were focused on the mathematical theory of resource planning, rather than the practical implementation of the whole process," says Allspaw.

"What this book is about is practical capacity planning and management that can take place in the real world. It's about using real tools, and being able to adapt to changing usage on a website that will (hopefully) grow over time," Allspaw continues. "When you have a flat tire on the highway, you could spend a lot of time trying to figure out the cause, or you can get on with the obvious task of installing the spare and getting back on the road. This is the approach I'm presenting to capacity planning: adaptive, not theoretical."

In The Art of Capacity Planning, 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

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 just help you prepare for explosive growth, it could possibly save you a lot of grief.

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