“There’s an incredible amount of depth and thinking in the practices described here, and it’s impressive to see it all in one place.”

―Win Treese, coauthor of Designing Systems for Internet Commerce

The Practice of Cloud System Administration, Volume 2, focuses on “distributed” or “cloud” computing and brings a DevOps/SRE sensibility to the practice of system administration. Unsatisfied with books that cover either design or operations in isolation, the authors created this authoritative reference centered on a comprehensive approach.

Case studies and examples from Google, Etsy, Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, and other industry giants are explained in practical ways that are useful to all enterprises. The new companion to the best-selling first volume, The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition, this guide offers expert coverage of the following and many other crucial topics:

Designing and building modern web and distributed systems

• Fundamentals of large system design
• Understand the new software engineering implications of cloud administration
• Make systems that are resilient to failure and grow and scale dynamically
• Implement DevOps principles and cultural changes
• IaaS/PaaS/SaaS and virtual platform selection

Operating and running systems using the latest DevOps/SRE strategies

• Upgrade production systems with zero down-time
• What and how to automate; how to decide what not to automate
• On-call best practices that improve uptime
• Why distributed systems require fundamentally different system administration techniques
• Identify and resolve resiliency problems before they surprise you

Assessing and evaluating your team’s operational effectiveness

• Manage the scientific process of continuous improvement
• A forty-page, pain-free assessment system you can start using today

Table of Contents

Part I Design: Building It

Chapter 1 Designing in a Distributed World

Chapter 2 Designing for Operations

Chapter 3 Selecting a Service Platform

Chapter 4 Application Architectures

Chapter 5 Design Patterns for Scaling

Chapter 6 Design Patterns for Resiliency

Part II Operations: Running It

Chapter 7 Operations in a Distributed World

Chapter 8 DevOps Culture

Chapter 9 Service Delivery: The Build Phase

Chapter 10 Service Delivery: The Deployment Phase

Chapter 11 Upgrading Live Services

Chapter 12 Automation

Chapter 13 Design Documents

Chapter 14 Oncall

Chapter 15 Disaster Preparedness

Chapter 16 Monitoring Fundamentals

Chapter 17 Monitoring Architecture and Practice

Chapter 18 Capacity Planning

Chapter 19 Creating KPIs

Chapter 20 Operational Excellence

Epilogue

Part III Appendices

Appendix A Assessments

Appendix B The Origins and Future of Distributed Computing and Clouds

Appendix C Scaling Terminology and Concepts

Appendix D Templates and Examples

Appendix E Recommended Reading

About the Authors

Thomas A. Limoncelli is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and system administrator with more than twenty years of experience at companies like Google, Bell Labs, and StackExchange.com.

Strata R. Chalup has more than twenty-five years of experience in Silicon Valley, focusing on IT strategy, best-practices, and scalable infrastructures at firms that include Apple, Sun, Cisco, McAfee, and Palm.

Christina J. Hogan has more than twenty years of experience in system administration and network engineering, from Silicon Valley to Italy and Switzerland. She has a master’s degree in computer science, a doctorate in aeronautical engineering, and has been part of a Formula 1 racing team.