Allspaw's playbook 2008/10/23

I just finished the proper book part (appendices tomorrow) of Allspaw's The Art of Capacity Planning.  His playbook is now my playbook.  I've got more than my fair share of charts and graphs (as all good engineers do) but am to some degree at a loss in using them.  On one hand, the book presents nothing but common sense and on the other, it has saved me endless trial-and-error.  I've been reading it on the morning bus and have put something into practice each day.

Most of his advice on growing a service applies equally to launching a service, albeit with a nasty chicken-and-egg problem that needs solving before your boss will let you buy hardware.  By piping production traffic into my dev environment I've been able, in stages at least, to put every bit of my architecture under real production load (empirical, as per the Allspaw doctrine), piling on more and more until my work queues go hockey stick.  (That'd be the bad kind of hockey stick.  The result speaks for itself.

Thank you, John Allspaw, for giving me a script to follow for the past week and a half.