Great book for those involved in building or hosting web applications!
This book does a great job of demystifying many of the misconceptions surrounding web applications, performance, scalability, hardware, software and proper architecture. Finding the right tool for the job is essential, and this book should be on every developer/engineer/managers book shelf!
The previous reviews don't really do it justice
This is a fantastic book about scalable systems. If you want specifics, he presents opensource and cost effective solutions that can be implemented, but in my opinion that isn't the real value of the book.
The real value is the way he leads you through the thought processess that need to occur as you plan for releasing and using such a system. I really like some of the stuff that is emphasized and has caused me to realize that I had gaps in my knowledge. Gaps like better release planning, and actual cost of such a system, especially as it grows, or shrinks.
I've been extremely happy with this purchase.
Just random notes put into a book
Reading this book was the worst experience.
Material in the book looks like collection of random notes.
Some of the topics like Load Balancing, High Availability not cover true details of the topic.
Overall, not a good book.
Look, ma! I can scale!
I can summarize this book:
* High availabililty and load balancing are as completely different as peanut butter and jelly.
* Spread is cool.
* Look, ma! I can write complex code in multiple languages!
Overall, however, I liked the book. It was all new material to me, and I'm
glad I read it.
for global scaling of your application
For those companies wanting to make available their assets on the Web, on a global scale, then this book can help. It describes the many ways that you can perform this scaling.
Like setting up image clusters that are geographically distributed. And applying methods that deliver packets to an IP address based on the shortest distance to one of a set of servers. A particular instantiation is called Anycast. But the idea is generally applicable.
Another issue is whether to have static or dynamic caching. Depending on the circumstances, one might be significantly cheaper than the other.
The book deals well with these and other issues.
