Xaprb

Web Operations

Web Operations. By John Allspaw and Jesse Robbins, O’Reilly 2010. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site).

This book is due out in about a month. It is part of O’Reilly’s Beautiful series, which you might know through Beautiful Code. This one’s about web ops, of course. There are a dozen contributors, including some of my favorites such as Theo Schlossnagle, whose Scalable Internet Architectures is on my (quite short) list of essential books. And then there’s a chapter from me.

My chapter is 32 pages on choosing a relational database architecture for a web application, which of course is slanted towards MySQL, where my expertise lies. I do not discuss fads or cool new things; I write about what the majority of web applications truly need, and how that maps to choices in architecture and technology for the database backend. I focus a lot on how to build a database backend that supports the application’s operational requirements, in keeping with the theme of the book. This is a much simpler topic than it’s often made into. I hope you’ll find it useful.

When I get a dead-tree copy of the rest of the book, I’ll review it. I can’t read books on my computer. But with authors like John, Jesse, Theo, and the others involved, I am pretty confident this one will be worth adding to your library. By the way, the royalties go to a charity, as with all the Beautiful books.