Guerrilla Capacity Planning

Guerrilla Capacity Planning. By Neil J. Gunther, Springer 2007. Page count: about 200 pages, plus appendixes. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site.)

Of all the books I’ve reviewed, this one has taken me the longest to study first. That’s because there is a lot of math involved, and Neil Gunther knows a lot more about it than I do. Here’s the short version: I’m learning how to use this in the real world, but that’s going to take many months, probably years. I’ve already spent about 10 months studying this book, and …

Cloud Application Architectures

Cloud Application Architectures. By George Reese, O’Reilly 2009. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site).

This is a great book on how to build apps in the cloud! I was happy to see how much depth it went into. It’s short — 150 pages plus some appendixes — so I was expecting it to be a superficial overview. But it isn’t. It is thorough. And it is also obviously built on his own experience building very specific applications that he uses to run his business — he isn’t preaching about stuff he doesn’t know first-hand. Finally, George Reese is a good writer! It’s impressive. This is how he covers so much ground with so much depth in so few pages, …

Web Operations

Web Operations. By John Allspaw and Jesse Robbins, O’Reilly 2010, with a chapter by myself. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site).

I wrote a chapter for this book, and it’s now on shelves in bookstores near you. I got my dead-tree copy today and read everyone else’s contributions to it. It’s a good book. A group effort such as this one is necessarily going to have some differences in style and even overlapping content, but overall it works very well. It includes chapters from some really smart people, some of whom I was not previously familiar with. John and Jesse obviously have good connections. A …

The Art of Capacity Planning

The Art of Capacity Planning. By John Allspaw, O’Reilly 2008. Page count: 130 pages. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site.)

This is an outstanding book. As far as I know Ewen Fortune was the first Perconian to read it, and it’s been spreading amongst us since then. I got my copy last week, and read it last night when I couldn’t sleep for some reason. It took me about 90 minutes to read.

This book doesn’t teach in generalities — it shows you exactly what to do. Rather than outlining the process of capacity planning (and it is a process!) and then letting you …