Kitchen Soap » Book

The new book: Web Operations

allspaw — Mon, 24 May 2010 02:21:34 +0000

At the Velocity Conference last year, I was talking to Mike Loukides from O’Reilly about the topics being presented and how it was so great to see such successful veterans of the field come out from behind the curtain and share their experiences. Mike said that there was interest in doing a book on the (obviously) broad subject of web operations, in a format similar to the Beautiful books that O’Reilly has in their Theory in Practice series.

Needless to say, I jumped at the chance to help out. Over the following months, Jesse Robbins and I wrangled a bunch of topics we thought were integral to the field and authors who could cover them. It’s in the final stages of being published as we speak, but I think it came out pretty damn good.

These folks cranked out great chapters while still doing their day jobs, and it shows. It’s a great collection of war stories, advice, and hard-earned lessons.

Here is a list of the chapters:

“The Web Ops Career Path” Theo Schlossnagle
“Cloud Computing At Picnik: Lessons Learned” Justin Huff
“Infrastructure and Application Metrics” Matt Massie and myself
“Continuous Deployment” Eric Ries
“Infrastructure as Code” Adam Jacob
“Monitoring” Patrick Debois
“How Complex Systems Fail” Dr. Richard Cook
“Community Management and Web Operations” Heather Champ
“Dealing With Unexpected Traffic Spikes” Brian Moon
“Dev and Ops Cooperation and Collaboration” Paul Hammond
“How Your Visitors Feel: User-Facing Metrics” Alistair Croll and Sean Power
“Relational Database Strategy and Tactics For The Web” Baron Schwartz
“The Art and Science of Postmortems” Jacob Loomis
“Managing Web Storage” Anoop Nagwani
“Nonrelational Datastores” Eric Florenzano
“Agile Infrastructure” Andrew Clay Shafer
“Things That Go Bump In The Night (And How To Sleep Through Them)” Michael Christian

Royalties from the sales will go to the national 826 Valencia organization, which is dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their writing skills. They do this by offering free drop-in tutoring at eight different locations around the country, as well as special events, student publishing, and scholarships.

I wrote a book about common sense.

allspaw — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:34:34 +0000

Whew. That took longer than I thought.

Todd Hoff over at the High Scalability blog has an email interview with me about a book that I wrote, called “The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources“. I’m still just happy that I got it done at all, seeing how it was due the same week that my son was born.

This book happened because of a LOT of people. You know who you are, because you’re in the Acknowledgements.

Four chapters of the new book on RoughCuts…

allspaw — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 22:04:31 +0000

So now there’s chapters 1-4 on Safari RoughCuts. Which means if you don’t mind shelling out the dough, you can take a look at what I’ve been getting up early for every day for the past few months. The working title is “The Art of Capacity Planning” and it’s meant to be a no-nonsense description of the capacity planning process and considerations for web operations.

I still have two chapters to go before it’s all finished, but if you’re nice enough to take a look at what I’ve got thus far, I’d appreciate any feedback. I’m sure there could be typos and some graphs misaligned, but such is life with “drafts”.