About The Book

LATEST - Reviews & Resources

On Feb 4th the Art of Scalability broke 500 and approached number 250 on the Amazon Bestseller List! It was also number 1 in the Amazon categories of Internet, Manager's Guides to Computing and Programming.

Interested in what people are saying about The Art of Scalability? Check out this review by Raj Oruganti on Srijan and this one by Martijn de Boer on Sexybiggetje. Read what people are saying about Martijn's review at Slashdot. You can also follow what's being Twittered about the book here. And lastly don't forget to complete Scott Ambler's "State of the IT Union" Survey for a chance to win a free copy of the book.

We've also added some resources for professors who would like to use the book as part of their class. Check out the button labeled "For Professors" in the menu ribbon above.

Book Description

The Art of Scalability teaches technology executives, engineers and architects how to solve technology scalability problems through changes in their architecture, processes and organization structure. The book provides a set of models and approaches that help back office, web services and other platforms scale. Rather than focusing on the optimization and tuning of existing systems, the book offers models developed by the authors to help companies rethink their technology architecture.

There are three problems that hyper growth technology companies often experience. The first problem is downtime of their site potentially costing millions of dollars. This downtime most often is a result of an architecture that does not scale on demand as consumer transactions grow at ever increasing rates. The second problem is a failure in the company and organizational process to quickly correct not only the current availability issues, but the longer term needs for future scale. The third problem is the failure of the organization to correct the outages and processes resulting in more and more time being spent on technology failures and less and less time being spent on new products and features. The Art of Scalability teaches the reader how to solve these three technology scalability problems.

What People Are Saying

Marty Cagan, Founder, Silicon Valley Product Group

This book is much more than you may think it is. Scale is not just about designing Web sites that doni't crash when lots of users show up. It is about designing your company so that it doesn't crash when your business needs to grow. These guys have been there on the front lines of some of the most successful Internet companies of our time, and they share the good, the bad, and the ugly about how to not just survive, but thrive.

Dana Stalder, General Partner, Matrix Partners

A must read for anyone building a web service for the mass market.

Geoffrey Weber, VP of Internet Operations/IT, Shutterfly

Abbott and Fisher have deep experiences with scale in both large and small enterprises. What.s unique about their approach to scalability is they start by focusing on the true foundation: people and process, without which true scalability cannot be built. Abbott and Fisher leverage their years of experience in a very accessible and practical approach to scalability that has been proven over time with their significant success.

Yishan Wong,Director of Engineering, Facebook

As a manager who worked under Michael Fisher and Marty Abbott during my time at PayPal/eBay, the opportunity to directly absorb the lessons and experiences presented in this book are invaluable to me now working at Facebook.

Jeremy Wright, CEO, b5media, Inc.

The Art of Scalability is by far the best book on scalability on the market today. The authors tackle the issues of scalability from processes, to people, to performance, to the highly technical. Whether your organization is just starting out and is defining processes as you go, or you are a mature organization, this is the ideal book to help you deal with scalability issues before, during, or after an incident. Having built several projects, programs, and companies from small to significant scale, I can honestly say I wish I had this book one, five, and ten years ago.

Warren M. Weiss, General Partner, Foundation Capital

If I wanted the best diagnoses for my health I would go to the Mayo Clinic. If I wanted the best diagnoses for my portfolio companies. performance and scalability I would call Martin and Michael. They have recommended solutions to performance and scalability issues that have saved some of my companies from a total rewrite of the system.

Current Blog Posts

Here are the most current posts from our blog.

• Book Reviews & Resources

  There have been a couple of reviews written up about The Art of Scalability. Here is one by Raj Oruganti on Srijan and another by Martijn de Boer on Sexybiggetje. You can also follow what’s being Twittered about the book here. And lastly don’t forget to complete Scott Ambler’s “State of the IT Union” [...]

• Team Conflict – Part 1

  Our December article in GigaOm had a brief nod to the myth that conflict in teams is bad.   In fact, practitioner experience and scholarly research agree that there are good forms of conflict and bad forms of conflict.  The good conflict, often referred to as cognitive conflict, is the healthy debate that teams get into [...]

• Intellectual Property

  If you think there are a hundred things you need to worry about as a startup, make it 101; you must not forget about intellectual property infringement. Unfortunately the environment surrounding intellectual property is complex and fraught with dangers for the unwary. Imagine a scenario where you come up with a great idea, spend thousands [...]