Architecting for Scale

Book excerpt: Every day, companies struggle to scale critical applications. As traffic volume and data demands increase, these applications become more complicated and brittle, exposing risks and compromising availability. This practical guide shows IT, devops, and system reliability managers how to prevent an application from becoming slow, inconsistent, or downright unavailable as it grows. Scaling isn’t just about handling more users; it’s also about managing risk and ensuring availability. Author Lee Atchison provides basic techniques for building applications that can handle huge quantities of traffic, data, and demand without affecting the quality your customers expect. In five parts, this book explores: Availability: learn techniques for building highly available applications, and for tracking and improving availability going forward Risk management: identify, mitigate, and manage risks in your application, test your recovery/disaster plans, and build out systems that contain fewer risks Services and microservices: understand the value of services for building complicated applications that need to operate at higher scale Scaling applications: assign services to specific teams, label the criticalness of each service, and devise failure scenarios and recovery plans Cloud services: understand the structure of cloud-based services, resource allocation, and service distribution