Capacity Planning for Web Operations

Capacity planning for growth is not a new concept in web operations, but planning for the explosive and unpredictable types of growth that social applications experience is a whole new ballgame.

This talk will take a look at new and different approaches to capacity planning, and how we do it at Flickr. John Allspaw will cover real-world challenges and lessons learned, on the following areas:

Measurement: Planning used to be driven only by server statistics and gut feelings. Social metrics also need to be taken into account as well as world events that could effect the community in unexpected ways.

Architecture: Making your application scalable isn’t the end of the story. Being capable of deploying capacity quickly isn’t an option, it’s a requirement.

Economics: Purchasing and deploying capacity too late can result in frustrated users and a stressed infrastructure. Deploying it too early can waste time and money.