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The art of scalability : scalable web architecture, processes, and organizations for the modern enterprise (2nd ed.)
Abbott M., Fisher M., Addison-Wesley Professional, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2015. 624 pp. Type: Book (978-0-134032-80-1)
Date Reviewed: Apr 19 2016

Finally, there is a comprehensive deep dive into scalability as an all-encompassing phenomenon including people, products, services, and technology. Even better, the authors emphasize scalability as an entirely people-driven process, as opposed to a technology-driven one.

Why is scalability the most important aspect of hyper-growth web-centric businesses? Scalability requires quantification at every level of a business (for example, personnel, services, products, and infrastructure). Quantification results in measurement. Measurement enables the proper management of a business. Hence, the driving force of managing a business is measuring the employees that enable its scalability.

The book starts with the following three fundamental insights and scales swimmingly into every other aspect of running a successful hyper-growth web-centric business:

1.“People are the single most important piece to get right if you hope to scale a product” (page 10).

2.Scalability is an art (albeit using the scientific method) to complement a company’s ecosystem (page 4).

3.Only a metrics-driven organization can scale reliably (page 12).

Consequently, the main parts of the book discuss three pivotal components of scalability: people, process, and technology. Scalability is a prerequisite for keeping the performance of a system constant under changing parameters. Take a brick-and-mortar company and add an e-commerce component. What additional challenges does the hyper-growth of the company pose for the IT department that all of the sudden has to satisfy online customers with high expectations, many alternatives, and little patience with technologies that are growing in exponential numbers on the Internet? While employees can be asked to learn the internal IT systems, no such assumption can be made for the casual user who may just want to purchase a widget from a site.

In the first edition of this book, the authors used All-Scale, a fictional company, for illustration purposes. The second edition has real-life examples from the wealth of companies the authors consulted for, which provide for more useful insights into the subject matter. Two separate chapters are dedicated to an assortment of issues and a discussion of new technologies (for example, grid and cloud), methodologies (for example, agile organizations), and paradigms (for example, big data). The appendices are a treasure trove of examples applying stringent methodologies to business operation and planning.

The book, intended for both technical and nontechnical readers, provides a bird’s eye view for decision makers and, at the same time, serves as a technical guide for practitioners. It is comprehensive, well written, and tightly organized, including a summary of takeaways at the end of each chapter, break-out boxes with case studies, clearly delineated procedures, methodologies, and “cheat sheets” for implementing and evaluating processes, progressing from qualitative to quantitative assessments. All of this information is based on the authors’ many years of experience and practice.

Authors like Allspaw [1] and Schlossnagle [2], who have covered scalability, did so with a tight focus on technology and implementation. Abbott and Fisher expand the view of scalability with regard to the ecosystem of a company and discuss every aspect of business, thus providing a 360-degree view of scalability.

More reviews about this item: Amazon

Reviewer:  Klaus K. Obermeier Review #: CR144331 (1607-0452)
1) Allspaw, J. The art of capacity planning: scaling web resources (1st ed.). O'Reilly Media, Beijing, 2008.
2) Schlossnagle, T. Scalable Internet architectures (1st ed.). Sams Publishing, Indianapolis, IN, 2006.
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