The Art of Capacity Planning - Short Review

The only books on capacity planning I’ve ever skimmed my way through have been dense, dull tomes of long mathematical formulas, advice that’s hard to use in any practical way and page counts in the treble digits. Thankfully John Allspaw has bucked this trend with The Art of Capacity Planning and instead written a slender, thought provoking, book.

The main focus of the book is that measurement is good, blind guessing is bad and that capacity planning, like security, is an ongoing process. While a lot of the material is common sense - which is never that common in IT - it’s a perfect introduction to capacity planning (and the principles of data collection and graphing) for novice to intermediate system administrators and a handy refresher for the experts in the crowd. I found it oddly reassuring that someone else has a lot of the same thoughts as I do when it comes to these topics.

The Art of Capacity Planning is an easy, engaging read that gets you thinking along the right lines without becoming dull or long winded. Well worth the couple of hours it’ll take to read - 8/10