Scalable Internet Architectures

by Theo Schlossnagle

As a developer, you are aware of the increasing concern amongst developers and site architects that websites be able to handle the vast number of visitors that flood the Internet on a daily basis. Scalable Internet Architectures addresses these concerns by teaching you both good and bad design methodologies for building new sites and how to scale existing websites to robust, high-availability websites. Primarily example-based, the book discusses major topics in web architectural design, presenting existing solutions and how they work. Technology budget tight? This book will work for you, too, as it introduces new and innovative concepts to solving traditionally expensive problems without a large technology budget. Using open source and proprietary examples, you will be engaged in best practice design methodologies for building new sites, as well as appropriately scaling both growing and shrinking sites. Website development help has arrived in the form of Scalable Internet Architectures .

Genres: Technology, Technical, Nonfiction, Computer Science, Web, Computers, Software

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Amir Sarabadani · Rating 3 out of 5]

The concepts mentioned in the book are timeless and still useful but technologies mentioned here are outdated (the book was released at 2006).
Worth skimming over but not worth reading

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. Definitely should be on the bookshelf of anyone running a large web service/site/application. Summary: "performance is not necessarily scalability", "know your tools", "measure", "good logging is really important" and "message buses can be really useful".

The book serves another useful purpose: it is really old school. Code examples are in Perl and C and Unix philosophy (small tools, doing one thing well, connected together) is demonstrated throughout and applied to contemporary technical problems, i.e., building a scalable web application. This is a good antidote the neophilia in technology circles, where only the latest languages, databases, and frameworks are thought worthwhile.

[Ala' Abuhijleh · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really did not find this book interesting for the following reasons:

1. Flow of ideas was not clear, I lost context so many times
2. Some ideas are over-illustrated
3. The flow is not smooth
4. Introduced no new ideas, thoughts or eye openers

I might be right, I might be wrong, but I really did not find anything special about this book

[Jack Repenning · Rating 3 out of 5]

What "NoSQL" is to data management, Theo Schlossnagle is to data-center and federated multi-tennant architectures. For good, for bad, for novel insights and resurrected ancient errors ... it's all there, along with a truculent, dismissive attitude.

[Nilan · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the only great books out in the early 2000s on how to scale

[Ramesh Mhetre · Rating 3 out of 5]

The concept mentioned in the book are basics of internet & web applications. In the era of cloud native this seems to be a bit different.

[Cheryl · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book reminds me of a rambling lecture from a professor who probably knows a lot (it's hard to be sure), but isn't very good at helping anyone else learn. I didn't actually finish this book -- switched to Building Scalable Web Sites instead, which seems much better so far.

[Terry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Remembered why this is 3 stars, easy to read, accessible....mostly, but author goes off on tangents of deeply bewildering programming in the end, so much, I forget the original problem. This also appears to be a book that shills for the Spread daemon... Which is not in itself a bad thing, but do wonder if some solutions could be dealt with message queueing. A decent book still....

[Arun · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book had just enough material to hold my interest in building scalable web systems. The code formatting in the ebook format was ugly and I just skimmed the last chapter which contains mostly C and perl code but the formatting made it hard to follow the logic. Overall a good starting point on learning about scalable web systems.

[Mao · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first book about scalability. It's was written a decade ago. I'm not sure how relevant the examples are since I'm not working in the field. I give a glimpse on the examples. In general, the book is well organized and the principle is clear. It focuses on the topic: Scalability, and touches relevant topics too.

[Vadim · Rating 3 out of 5]

First half of the book will suit perfectly if you have trouble telling high availability from load balancing. Introduces some of the networking concepts, albeit superficially. The last half of the book is basically an advertisement and a manual for the Spread/Wackamole tools.

[Mayank Jaiswal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book but a bit outdated today. Anyone reading it today in 2017 might feel that many concepts explained are too low level given the technologies available today. May be reading a summary of
this book will suffice.

[Venkatesh-Prasad · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the problems presented in the book are interesting and relevant, the solutions seem a bit dated. I guess more recent books like "Designing Data-intensive applications" and "Scalability Rules" may present more relevant/current solutions.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book. Packed with useful information for real-world sysadmins.

[Timon Karnezos · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit out of date, but if you're new to IT on anything larger than the one or two server scale, this is a very enlightening read.

[Philip Cristiano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great intro to many topics you should always keep in mind. Some of the technology mentioned is outdated but the techniques still apply.

[Alexis · Rating 2 out of 5]

outdated in many ways

[Justine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somewhat less accessible than I was honestly ready for, but very informative.

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

published in 2006 which is not very up to date (2012 when I read it). but good enough for building scalable internet apps on your own hardware.

[Kirill Klimov]

already arrived ;)

[Alexander Shishenko · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about principles of building scalable architectures, but the author gives too much attention to a specific technology (Spread) instead of telling about vendor-unspecific approach.