Art of Scalability, The

The Comprehensive, Proven Approach to IT Scalability-Updated with New Strategies, Technologies, and Case Studies

In The Art of Scalability, Second Edition, leading scalability consultants Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher cover everything you need to know to smoothly scale products and services for any requirement. This extensively revised edition reflects new technologies, strategies, and lessons, as well as new case studies from the authors' pioneering consulting practice, AKF Partners.

Writing for technical and nontechnical decision-makers, Abbott and Fisher cover everything that impacts scalability, including architecture, process, people, organization, and technology. Their insights and recommendations reflect more than thirty years of experience at companies ranging from eBay to Visa, and Salesforce.com to Apple.

You'll find updated strategies for structuring organizations to maximize agility and scalability, as well as new insights into the cloud (IaaS/PaaS) transition, NoSQL, DevOps, business metrics, and more. Using this guide's tools and advice, you can systematically clear away obstacles to scalability-and achieve unprecedented IT and business performance.

Coverage includes

. Why scalability problems start with organizations and people, not technology, and what to do about it

. Actionable lessons from real successes and failures

. Staffing, structuring, and leading the agile, scalable organization

. Scaling processes for hyper-growth environments

. Architecting scalability: proprietary models for clarifying needs and making choices-including 15 key success principles

. Emerging technologies and challenges: data cost, datacenter planning, cloud evolution, and customer-aligned monitoring

. Measuring availability, capacity, load, and performance

Autorentext

Martin L. Abbott is a founding partner at the growth and scalability advisory firm AKF Partners. He was formerly chief operations officer at Quigo, an advertising technology startup sold to AOL, where he was responsible for product strategy, product management, technology development, and client services. Marty spent nearly six years at eBay, most recently as senior vice president of technology, chief technology officer, and member of the executive staff. Prior to his time at eBay, Marty held domestic and international engineering, management, and executive positions at Gateway and Motorola. He has served on the boards of directors of several private and public companies. Marty has a B.S. in computer science from the United States Military Academy, has an M.S. in computer engineering from the University of Florida, is a graduate of the Harvard Business School Executive Education Program, and has a Doctor of Management from Case Western Reserve University.

Michael T. Fisher is a founding partner at the growth and scalability advisory firm AKF Partners. Prior to cofounding AKF Partners, Michael was the chief technology officer at Quigo, a startup Internet advertising company that was acquired by AOL in 2007. Before his time at Quigo, Michael served as vice president, engineering and architecture, for PayPal, Inc., an eBay company. Prior to joining PayPal, he spent seven years at General Electric helping to develop the company's technology strategy and was a Six Sigma Master Black Belt. Michael served six years as a Captain and pilot in the U.S. Army. He received a Ph.D. and an MBA from Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management, an M.S. in information systems from Hawaii-Pacific University, and a B.S. in computer science from the United States Military Academy (West Point). Michael is an adjunct professor in the design and innovation department at Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management.

Inhalt

Foreword xxiii

Acknowledgments xxvii

About the Authors xxix

Introduction 1

Part I: Staffing a Scalable Organization 7

Chapter 1: The Impact of People and Leadership on Scalability 9

The Case Method 9

Why People? 10

Why Organizations? 11

Why Management and Leadership? 17

Conclusion 19

Chapter 2: Roles for the Scalable Technology Organization 21

The Effects of Failure 21

Defining Roles 23

Executive Responsibilities 25

Individual Contributor Responsibilities 30

A Tool for Defining Responsibilities 35

Conclusion 39

Chapter 3: Designing Organizations 41

Organizational Influences That Affect Scalability 41

Team Size 44

Organizational Structure 51

Conclusion 69

Chapter 4: Leadership 101 71

What Is Leadership? 72

Leadership: A Conceptual Model 74

Taking Stock of Who You Are 76

Leading from the Front 78

Checking Your Ego at the Door 79

Mission First, People Always 80

Making Timely, Sound, and Morally Correct Decisions 81

Empowering Teams and Scalability 82

Alignment with Shareholder Value 83

Transformational Leadership 84

Vision 84

Mission 87

Goals 89

Putting It All Together 90

The Causal Roadmap to Success 94

Conclusion 95

Chapter 5: Management 101 99

What Is Management? 100

Project and Task Management 102

Building Teams: A Sports Analogy 105

Upgrading Teams: A Garden Analogy 107

Measurement, Metrics, and Goal Evaluation 111

The Goal Tree 114

Paving the Path for Success 115

Conclusion 116

Chapter 6: Relationships, Mindset, and the Business Case 119

Understanding the Experiential Chasm 119

Defeating the IT Mindset 122

The Business Case for Scale 124

Conclusion 127

Part II: Building Processes for Scale 129

Chapter 7: Why Processes Are Critical to Scale 131

The Purpose of Process 132

Right Time, Right Process 135

When Good Processes Go Bad 139

Conclusion 140

Chapter 8: Managing Incidents and Problems 143

What Is an Incident? 144

What Is a Problem? 145

The Components of Incident Management 146

The Components of Problem Management 149

Resolving Conflicts Between Incident and Problem Management 150

Incident and Problem Life Cycles 150

Implementing the Daily Incident Meeting 152

Implementing the Quarterly Incident Review 153

The Postmortem Process 153

Putting It All Together 156

Conclusion 157

Chapter 9: Managing Crises and Escalations 159

What Is a Crisis? 160

Why Differentiate a Crisis from Any Other Incident? 161

How Crises Can Change a Company 162

Order Out of Chaos 163

Communications and Control 168

The War Room 169

Escalations 170

Status Communications 171

Crisis Postmortem and Communication 172

Conclusion 173

Chapter 10: Controlling Change in Production Environments 177

What Is a Change? 178

Change Identification 179

Change Management 180

The Change Control Meeting 191

Continuous Process Improvement 192

Conclusion 193

Chapter 11: Determining Headroom for Applications 197

Purpose of the Process 198

Structure of the Process 199

Ideal Usage Percentage 203

A Quick Example Using Spreadsheets 206

Conclusion 207

Chapter 12: Establishing Architectural Principles 209

Principles and Goals 209

Principle Selection 212

AKF's Most Commonly Adopted Architectural Principles 214

Conclusion 222

Chapter 13: Joint Architecture Design and Architecture Review Board 225

Fixing Organizational Dysfunction 225

Designing for Scale Cross-Functionally 226

JAD Entry and Exit Criteria 228

From JAD to ARB 230

Conducting the Meeting 232

ARB Entry and Exit Criteria 234

Conclusion 236

Chapter 14: Agile Architecture Design 239

Architecture in Agile Organizations 240

Ownership of Architecture 241

Limited Resources 242

Standards 243

ARB in the Agile Organization 246

Conclusion 247

Chapter 15: Focus on Core Competencies: Build Versus Buy 249

Building Versus Buying, and Scalability 249

Focusing on Cost 250

Focusing on Strategy 251

"Not Built Here" Phenomenon 252

Mer…