Reviews for The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise

The average rating for The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-12-17 00:00:00 Bonnie Stimpak There is a huge amount of information in this book. It's broadly broken down into scalability of people, process, and technology, with a very clear and structured approach all the way through. Each section taught me far more than I expected, given that I live and breath this stuff at work every day (helping grow Lookout from 1000 to 30+ million users and 6 to 160 employees in the last 3.5 years). This book isn't intended to provide all the details about every (or even any) subject it talks about, but it provides a framework for making sure you are thinking about everything you need to think about and aren't caught unawares. I would've loved more links to where to read more, but those would probably tend to go out of date quickly in any case and this book is clearly designed to try and remain relevant over time. The people section focuses on organizational structure, leadership, management, and communication. I was greatly amused by the number of things I read about in this book shortly before we started talking about them within the company (it took me ~5 months to read this book, since it's pretty dense and I kept putting it down to read other stuff). I would've loved a discussion around onboarding and culture in the book, since in any high-growth company those become important issues very quickly. The process section was great. It covers a wide range of types of processes, including incident response, change management, architectural design and review, risk analysis and management, and deployment issues. Some of those may not sound like processes at first, but they provide a way of thinking about them that really makes sense (to me at least). Their 12 architectural principles were great -- I've added them to my crib sheet for things to keep in mind when I design. One minor nit, I felt like their chapter on controlling change in production environments ignored the growth and potential of tools like Chef and Puppet for ensuring that there are never manual tweaks on production servers. The technology section dives into more depth around a few of the architectural principles laid out in the prior section. It talks a lot about how to design a system such that it can grown smoothly over time and adapt to growth along unexpected axes. Obviously a lot of this is more abstract, since the details are very dependent upon individual circumstances, but they provide some good approaches to thinking about the issues involved. Overall a highly recommended book for anyone working in a high growth tech company.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-11-26 00:00:00 Mark Cubitt Основательный труд, рассматривающий явление масштабирования с разных сторон: люди, процессы, архитектура, железо и прочее. Рекомендую строителям больших информационных систем.