About the author: Theo Schlossnagle is the founder and CEO of OmtiTI.
The Book: This book aims to be a comprehensive, technology stack-agnostic compendium of strategies and guidelines to achieving scalability objectives for internet applications. It is quite thin (262 pages) and came out in 2007, when the DevOps meme was not around in its current form.
Why I like this book: I like this book because it's oriented towards building a solid foundation on topics related to scaling. Compare this book with 'Web Operations: Keeping the Data on Time' (published in late 2010), and you'll find the book under discussion to be more grounded in fundamental principles, and the latter more oriented towards new trends. Now there's nothing wrong with the 'latest-trend' books, but it's better if one reads this kind first to get a good grounding.
Overview of Chapters: The first three chapters cover basic principles, managing release cycles and operations teams.
A big part of chapter 4 is devoted to explaining the difference between high availability and load balancing. There's no coverage of Cloud based options here – this is for you if you manage your own datacenters. Also, cloud based options will invariably be tied to specific vendors. Different HA options are considered with almost academic rigour.
Chapter 5 examines load balancing options at different layers of the OSI network stack.
Chapter 6 is a mini-guide to building your own Content Delivery Network. From calculating your expected traffic, cost estimates, inter-node synchronization in a cluster to choosing the OS and having an HA network configuration – it's an interesting journey. It brings out the challenges which are invisible to most of us who push our static content to a third party CDN and forget about it. There's a section on DNS issues as well covering Anycast.
Chapter 7 covers five caching techniques. True to the general theme of the book, it does not talk about specific technologies but about theory that can be studied and applied to the problem at hand. An example of speeding up a news website is used to illustrate how to deploy and tune memcached (for that specific site's design).
In Chapter 8, we see an overview of distributed databases, including an overview of different database replication strategies. Managing, storing, aggregating and parsing logs is a challenge we all face – this is covered in Chapter 9. This chapter is dated now as there have been many advances on this topic.
Overall, a must-have for anybody who is interested or works in scaling internet facing applications.