Scalability Rules: 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites

Martin L. Abbott · Michael T. Fisher

May 2011 · Pearson Education

About this ebook

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

Ratings and reviews

This is an excellent book for anyone designing a web service. I initially thought the whole "rule" thing might cheapen the content of the book. In reality its exactly the opposite. Rather then focusing on high level theories, the book gives specific ideas which you can directly apply to the code you are working on. The format makes it directly useful for programmers. You don't have to read the whole book to get useful information. By being broken into rules which are only a couple of pages, this book is just as usable as a reference which you might look at in the same way as the documentation on a library you are using. Its therefore good to just have around when your working, rather then trying to approach the book as a lesson that needs to be fully internalized all at once.

About the author

Martin L. Abbott, formerly COO of Quigo, spent nearly six years at eBay, most recently as SVP of Technology/CTO. He has held engineering, management, and executive positions at Gateway and Motorola. Michael T. Fisher, a veteran software and technology executive, spent two years as CTO of Quigo. Previously, as VP of Engineering & Architecture for PayPal, he led 200+ developers. Abbott and Fisher co-authored The Art of Scalability (Addison-Wesley).