About The Book

LATEST - Book Review

David Carr, a Forbes' Business Intelligence columnist, recently posted a review, A Handbook For Hypergrowth, on The Art of Scalability.

Videos

You can find a short video about AKF Partners and The Art of Scalability on our Amazon Author Page. Here is a funny video spoofing the Third Reich trying to scale their site.

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.

• The 4 Hour Workweek – Stories from a Life Hack

  I wish I had come up with the term “life hack”, but I didn’t.  I first heard it from my partner Mike Fisher who applied it to Tim Ferriss during our discussion of his book “The 4 Hour Work Week”.  Wikipedia indicates that “life hack” is a programmer’s term used to describe what we’ve sometimes [...]

• Airline Metrics

  I was on a flight the other day. Which airline doesn’t matter because this story applies to any of them. The flight was scheduled to depart at 1:30pm. The aircraft was an Embraer ERJ-145 which only holds about 50 passengers. At the request of the flight attendant we hurriedly boarded and shut down our electronic [...]

• Stop Doing Annual Reviews

  It’s annual review season again and lots of you managers are probably swamped trying to write pages of feedback, both positive and negative, for your employees. My advice for the coming year is to stop doing annual reviews. Workers today, millennials especially, don’t want to wait for a review or feedback once per year. This [...]

• 4 Things I Wish I’d Learned as an Undergraduate

  I recently had the honor to speak with the CS and IT majors of the USMA (West Point) Class of 2010.  Recognizing that these young men carry an incredible burden for all of us,  I struggled for what I could tell them.  These young men and women, after all, are going to be the tools [...]