Every day, companies struggle to scale critical applications. As traffic volume and data demands increase, these applications become more complicated and brittle, exposing risks and compromising availability. This practical guide shows IT, devops, and system reliability managers how to prevent an application from becoming slow, inconsistent, or downright unavailable as it grows.Scaling isn’t just about handling more users; it’s also about managing risk and ensuring availability. Author Lee Atchison provides basic techniques for building applications that can handle huge quantities of traffic, data, and demand without affecting the quality your customers expect.In five parts, this book explores:Availability: learn techniques for building highly available applications, and for tracking and improving availability going forwardRisk management: identify, mitigate, and manage risks in your application, test your recovery/disaster plans, and build out systems that contain fewer risksServices and microservices: understand the value of services for building complicated applications that need to operate at higher scaleScaling applications: assign services to specific teams, label the criticalness of each service, and devise failure scenarios and recovery plansCloud services: understand the structure of cloud-based services, resource allocation, and service distribution

Lee Atchison is a Principal Engineer and Architecture Lead at New Relic. He’s been with New Relic for nearly four years where, among other things, he designed and lead the building of the New Relic Platform and infrastructure products. As architect lead, Lee has helped New Relic build a solid service-based system architecture that scales as they have grown from a simple SaaS startup to a high traffic public enterprise.

Lee has committed his career to architecting and building high scale, cloud-based, service oriented, SaaS applications. He has a specific expertise in building highly available systems.

Lee learned cloud-based, scalable systems while working seven years as a Senior Manager and Principal Program Manager at Amazon.com. At Amazon, he led the creation of the company’s first software download store (app store), created AWS Elastic Beanstalk offering (Platform as a Service), and lead the team that managed the migration of Amazon’s retail platform from a monolith to an SOA-based architecture.

Additionally, Lee spent several years in the network management space working for two different startups, and twelve years in the Test & Measurement space at Hewlett Packard. At Hewlett Packard, among other things, he lead standardization work for key IEEE and industry standards in the T&M sector, and wrote a book on building T&M software systems published by Prentice Hall.

Overall, Lee has 28 years of industry experience. He has worked in companies of all size, from very small startups to very large corporate enterprises (such as Hewlett Packard), and all sizes in between. He has multiple patents, including a patent for dynamically managing compute capacity for web page requests at Amazon/AWS (patent #20140156835).