Scalability Rules: Principles for Scaling Web Sites, 2/e

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”