A web application involves many specialists, but it takes people in web ops to ensure that everything works together throughout an application’s lifetime.
A web application involves many specialists, but it takes people in web ops to ensure that everything works together throughout an application’s lifetime. It’s the expertise you need when your start-up gets an unexpected spike in web traffic, or when a new feature causes your mature application to fail.
In “Web Operations”, web veterans such as Theo Schlossnagle, Baron Schwartz, and Alistair Croll offer insights into this evolving field. You’ll get stories from the trenches–from builders of some of the biggest sites on the Web–about what’s necessary to help a site thrive.
“The Web is changing the way we live and touches every person alive,” writes Jesse Robbins in the book’s foreword. “As more and more people depend on the Web, they depend on us. ‘Web Operations’ is work that matters.”
- – Learn the skills needed in web operations, and why they’re gained through experience rather than schooling
- Understand why it’s important to gather metrics from both your application and infrastructure
- Consider common approaches to database architectures and the pitfalls that come with increasing scale
- Learn how to handle the human side of outages and degradations
- Find out how one company avoided disaster after a huge traffic deluge
- Discover what went wrong after a problem occurs, and how to prevent it from happening again
John Allspaw has worked in systems operations for over 14 years in biotech, government, and online media. He started out tuning parallel clusters running vechicle crash simulations for the U.S. government, and then moved on to the Internet in 1997. He built the backing infrastructures at Salon, InfoWorld, Friendster, and Flickr. He is now VP of Tech Operations at Etsy, and is the author of “The Art of Capacity Planning”.
Jesse Robbins is CEO of Opscode (makers of Chef) and a recognized expert in Infrastructure, Web Operations, and Emergency Management. He serves as co-chair of the Velocity Web Performance & Operations Conference and contributes to the O’Reilly Radar. Prior to co-founding Opscode, he worked at Amazon.com with a title of “Master of Disaster” where he was responsible for Website Availability for every property bearing the Amazon brand.
Web Operations
Edited by John Allspaw & Jesse Robbins
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