Scalability Rules

50 Powerful, Easy-to-Use Rules for Supporting Hypergrowth in Any Environment Scalability Rules is the easy-to-use scalability primer and reference for every architect, developer, web professional, and manager. Authors Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher have helped scale more than 200 hypergrowth Internet sites through their consulting practice. Now, drawing on their unsurpassed experience, they present 50 clear, proven scalability rules—and practical guidance for applying them. Abbott and Fisher transform scalability from a “black art” to a set of realistic, technology-agnostic best practices for supporting hypergrowth in nearly any environment, including both frontend and backend systems. For architects, they offer powerful new insights for creating and evaluating designs. For developers, they share specific techniques for handling everything from databases to state. For managers, they provide invaluable help in goal-setting, decision-making, and interacting with technical teams. Whatever your role, you’ll find practical risk/benefit guidance for setting priorities—and getting maximum “bang for the buck.” • Simplifying architectures and avoiding “over-engineering” • Scaling via cloning, replication, separating functionality, and splitting data sets • Scaling out, not up • Getting more out of databases without compromising scalability • Avoiding unnecessary redirects and redundant double-checking • Using caches and content delivery networks more aggressively, without introducing unacceptable complexity • Designing for fault tolerance, graceful failure, and easy rollback • Striving for statelessness when you can; efficiently handling state when you must • Effectively utilizing asynchronous communication • Learning quickly from mistakes, and much more

"Once again, Abbott and Fisher provide a book that I''ll be giving to our engineers. It''s an essential read for anyone dealing with scaling an online business." --Chris Lalonde, VP, Technical Operations and Infrastructure Architecture, Bullhorn "Abbott and Fisher again tackle the difficult problem of scalability in their unique and practical manner. Distilling the challenges of operating a fast-growing presence on the Internet into 50 easy-to understand rules, the authors provide a modern cookbook of scalability recipes that guide the reader through the difficulties of fast growth." --Geoffrey Weber, Vice President, Internet Operations, Shutterfly "Abbott and Fisher have distilled years of wisdom into a set of cogent principles to avoid many nonobvious mistakes." --Jonathan Heiliger, VP, Technical Operations, Facebook "In The Art of Scalability, the AKF team taught us that scale is not just a technology challenge. Scale is obtained only through a combination of people, process, and technology. With Scalability Rules, Martin Abbott and Michael Fisher fill our scalability toolbox with easily implemented and time-tested rules that once applied will enable massive scale." --Jerome Labat,VP, Product Development IT, Intuit "When I joined Etsy, I partnered with Mike and Marty to hit the ground running in my new role, and it was one of the best investments of time I have made in my career. The indispensable advice from my experience working with Mike and Marty is fully captured here in this book. Whether you''re taking on a role as a technology leader in a new company or you simply want to make great technology decisions, Scalability Rules will be the go-to resource on your bookshelf." --Chad Dickerson, CTO, Etsy "Scalability Rules provides an essential set of practical tools and concepts anyone can use when designing, upgrading, or inheriting a technology platform. It''s very easy to focus on an immediate problem and overlook issues that will appear in the future. This book ensures strategic design principles are applied to everyday challenges." --Robert Guild, Director and Senior Architect, Financial Services "An insightful, practical guide to designing and building scalable systems. A must-read for both product-building and operations teams, this book offers concise and crisp insights gained from years of practical experience of AKF principals. With the complexity of modern systems, scalability considerations should be an integral part of the architecture and implementation process. Scaling systems for hypergrowth requires an agile, iterative approach that is closely aligned with product features; this book shows you how." --Nanda Kishore, Chief Technology Officer, ShareThis "For organizations looking to scale technology, people, and processes rapidly or effectively, the twin pairing of Scalability Rules and The Art of Scalability are unbeatable. The rules-driven approach in Scalability Rules makes this not only an easy reference companion, but also allows organizations to tailor the Abbott and Fisher approach to their specific needs both immediately and in the future!" --Jeremy Wright, CEO, BNOTIONS.ca and Founder, b5media 50 Powerful, Easy-to-Use Rules for Supporting Hypergrowth in Any Environment Scalability Rules is the easy-to-use scalability primer and reference for every architect, developer, web professional, and manager. Authors Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher have helped scale more than 200 hypergrowth Internet sites through their consulting practice. Now, drawing on their unsurpassed experience, they present 50 clear, proven scalability rules-and practical guidance for applying them. Abbott and Fisher transform scalability from a "black art" to a set of realistic, technology-agnostic best practices for supporting hypergrowth in nearly any environment, including both frontend and backend systems. For architects, they offer powerful new insights for creating and evaluating designs. For developers, they share specific techniques for handling everything from databases to state. For managers, they provide invaluable help in goal-setting, decision-making, and interacting with technical teams. Whatever your role, you''ll find practical risk/benefit guidance for setting priorities-and getting maximum "bang for the buck." * Simplifying architectures and avoiding "over-engineering" * Scaling via cloning, replication, separating functionality, and splitting data sets * Scaling out, not up * Getting more out of databases without compromising scalability * Avoiding unnecessary redirects and redundant double-checking * Using caches and content delivery networks more aggressively, without introducing unacceptable complexity * Designing for fault tolerance, graceful failure, and easy rollback * Striving for statelessness when you can; efficiently handling state when you must * Effectively utilizing asynchronous communication * Learning quickly from mistakes, and much more

Fully updated! Fifty Powerful, Easy-to-Use Rules for Supporting Hyper Growth “Whether you’re taking on a role as a technology leader in a new company or you simply want to make great technology decisions, Scalability Rules will be the go-to resource on your bookshelf.” –Chad Dickerson, CTO, Etsy Scalability Rules, Second Edition, is the easy-to-use scalability primer and reference for every architect, developer, network/software engineer, web professional, and manager. Authors Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher have helped scale hundreds of high-growth companies and thousands of systems. Drawing on their immense experience, they present 50 up-to-the-minute technical best practices for supporting hyper growth practically anywhere. Fully updated to reflect new technical trends and experiences, this edition is even easier to read, understand, and apply. Abbott and Fisher have also added powerful “stories behind the rules”: actual experiences and case studies from CTOs and technology executives at Etsy, NASDAQ, Salesforce, Shutterfly, Chegg, Warby Parker, Twitter, and other scalability pioneers. Architects will find powerful technology-agnostic insights for creating and evaluating designs. Developers will discover specific techniques for handling everything from databases to state. Managers will get invaluable help in setting goals, making decisions, and interacting with technical teams. Whatever your role, you’ll find practical risk/benefit guidance for setting priorities, translating plans into action, and gaining maximum scalability at minimum cost. You’ll learn how to Simplify architectures and avoid “over-engineering” Design scale into your solution, so you can scale on a just-in-time basis Make the most of cloning and replication Separate functionality and split data sets Scale out, not up Get more out of databases without compromising scalability Eliminate unnecessary redirects and redundant double-checking Use caches and CDNs more aggressively, without unacceptable complexity Design for fault tolerance, graceful failure, and easy rollback Emphasize statelessness, and efficiently handle state when you must Effectively utilize asynchronous communication Learn from your own mistakes and others’ high-profile failures Prioritize your actions to get the biggest “bang for the buck”

The Comprehensive, Proven Approach to IT Scalability–Updated with New Strategies, Technologies, and Case Studies In The Art of Scalability, Second Edition, leading scalability consultants Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher cover everything you need to know to smoothly scale products and services for any requirement. This extensively revised edition reflects new technologies, strategies, and lessons, as well as new case studies from the authors’ pioneering consulting practice, AKF Partners. Writing for technical and nontechnical decision-makers, Abbott and Fisher cover everything that impacts scalability, including architecture, process, people, organization, and technology. Their insights and recommendations reflect more than thirty years of experience at companies ranging from eBay to Visa, and Salesforce.com to Apple. You’ll find updated strategies for structuring organizations to maximize agility and scalability, as well as new insights into the cloud (IaaS/PaaS) transition, NoSQL, DevOps, business metrics, and more. Using this guide’s tools and advice, you can systematically clear away obstacles to scalability–and achieve unprecedented IT and business performance. Coverage includes • Why scalability problems start with organizations and people, not technology, and what to do about it • Actionable lessons from real successes and failures • Staffing, structuring, and leading the agile, scalable organization • Scaling processes for hyper-growth environments • Architecting scalability: proprietary models for clarifying needs and making choices–including 15 key success principles • Emerging technologies and challenges: data cost, datacenter planning, cloud evolution, and customer-aligned monitoring • Measuring availability, capacity, load, and performance

"This is science writing as wonder and as inspiration." —The Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal From one of the most influential scientists of our time, a dazzling exploration of the hidden laws that govern the life cycle of everything from plants and animals to the cities we live in. Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term “complexity” can be misleading, however, because what makes West’s discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities and our businesses. Fascinated by aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science: West found that despite the riotous diversity in mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mammal’s circulatory systems scales up precisely based on weight: if you compare a mouse, a human and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25% more efficient—and lives 25% longer. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism’s body. West’s work has been game-changing for biologists, but then he made the even bolder move of exploring his work’s applicability. Cities, too, are constellations of networks and laws of scalability relate with eerie precision to them. Recently, West has applied his revolutionary work to the business world. This investigation has led to powerful insights into why some companies thrive while others fail. The implications of these discoveries are far-reaching, and are just beginning to be explored. Scale is a thrilling scientific adventure story about the elemental natural laws that bind us together in simple but profound ways. Through the brilliant mind of Geoffrey West, we can envision how cities, companies and biological life alike are dancing to the same simple, powerful tune.

One of the biggest challenges for organizations that have adopted microservice architecture is the lack of architectural, operational, and organizational standardization. After splitting a monolithic application or building a microservice ecosystem from scratch, many engineers are left wondering what’s next. In this practical book, author Susan Fowler presents a set of microservice standards in depth, drawing from her experience standardizing over a thousand microservices at Uber. You’ll learn how to design microservices that are stable, reliable, scalable, fault tolerant, performant, monitored, documented, and prepared for any catastrophe. Explore production-readiness standards, including: Stability and Reliability: develop, deploy, introduce, and deprecate microservices; protect against dependency failures Scalability and Performance: learn essential components for achieving greater microservice efficiency Fault Tolerance and Catastrophe Preparedness: ensure availability by actively pushing microservices to fail in real time Monitoring: learn how to monitor, log, and display key metrics; establish alerting and on-call procedures Documentation and Understanding: mitigate tradeoffs that come with microservice adoption, including organizational sprawl and technical debt

If you need to build a scalable, fault tolerant system with requirements for high availability, discover why the Erlang/OTP platform stands out for the breadth, depth, and consistency of its features. This hands-on guide demonstrates how to use the Erlang programming language and its OTP framework of reusable libraries, tools, and design principles to develop complex commercial-grade systems that simply cannot fail. In the first part of the book, you’ll learn how to design and implement process behaviors and supervision trees with Erlang/OTP, and bundle them into standalone nodes. The second part addresses reliability, scalability, and high availability in your overall system design. If you’re familiar with Erlang, this book will help you understand the design choices and trade-offs necessary to keep your system running. Explore OTP’s building blocks: the Erlang language, tools and libraries collection, and its abstract principles and design rules Dive into the fundamentals of OTP reusable frameworks: the Erlang process structures OTP uses for behaviors Understand how OTP behaviors support client-server structures, finite state machine patterns, event handling, and runtime/code integration Write your own behaviors and special processes Use OTP’s tools, techniques, and architectures to handle deployment, monitoring, and operations

This book is the "Hello, World" tutorial for building products, technologies, and teams in a startup environment. It's based on the experiences of the author, Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman, as well as interviews with programmers from some of the most successful startups of the last decade, including Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, Stripe, Instagram, AdMob, Pinterest, and many others. Hello, Startup is a practical, how-to guide that consists of three parts: Products, Technologies, and Teams. Although at its core, this is a book for programmers, by programmers, only Part II (Technologies) is significantly technical, while the rest should be accessible to technical and non-technical audiences alike. If you’re at all interested in startups—whether you’re a programmer at the beginning of your career, a seasoned developer bored with large company politics, or a manager looking to motivate your engineers—this book is for you.