Success on the web is measured by usage and growth. Web-based companies live or die by the ability to scale their infrastructure to accommodate increasing demand. This book is a hands-on and practical guide to planning for such growth, as it discusses the many techniques and considerations needed to plan, deploy, and manage infrastructure for a growing web application. "The Art of Capacity Planning" is written by the manager of data operations for the world-famous photo-sharing site Flickr.com (owned by Yahoo!).John Allspaw draws on years of experience, starting from the days when Flickr was relatively small and had to deal with the typical growth pains and cost/performance trade-offs of a typical company with a Web presence. He combines personal anecdotes from many phases of Flickr's growth with insights from his colleagues in many other industries to give you solid guidelines for measuring your growth, predicting trends, and making cost-effective preparations. The topics include: Evaluating tools for measurement and deployment; Capacity analysis and prediction for storage, database, and application servers; Designing architectures to easily add and measure capacity; Handling sudden spikes; Predicting exponential and explosive growth; and How cloud services such as EC2 can fit into a capacity strategy.