Capacity Planning for Web Services: Metrics, Models, and Methods

As Web Services get implemented, this book can be a vital tool in planning for the deployment. The authors have a rigorous methodology to estimate the many performance issues encountered when you try to build out an actual Web Service. They discuss important ideas like content delivery networks, which cache or mirror content at different physical locations, so that the response time to a user's query is minimised. And it also adds redundancy. Think Akamai, for instance. A crucial aspect they explain is how to develop a cost model for a data centre facing a certain expected rate of queries coming in from the net. Practical advice on what things to cost out and how to do so, as shown in various examples. Most books on Web Services published after this book often discuss the networking together of various services. Using WSDL or BPEL to describe these configurations. BPEL may not have even existed in 2001 when the book was published. But the book is certainly not outdated. Nothing in it is tied to a specific version of a Web Services grammar. Those other books are more about explaining the syntax. Few delve into actual deployment scaling issues that cannot be avoided if you have to go live.

Although the title is new, this book is based on the authors' 1998 book titled "Web PErformance Metrics, Models and Methods (ISBN 0136938221). This book is more than a minor rewrite - the chapters are in a different sequence, and each has been updated. None of the information that made the older book such a valuable resource was lost in the process. For example, the material on queuing theory and analysis remains, and it among the best written tutorials in print. What has changed includes:(1) Shifting of focus from client/server and web server environments to web services, with an emphasis on performance characteristics of SOAP and UDDI. Client server issues are still covered because these issues are still germane.(2) An emphasis on architecture and how performance and capacity fit into a larger picture. Network and server performance characteristics are examined in detail.What hasn't changed includes the excellent material on performance and benchmarking basics, detailed analysis techniques, and the support for this book that the authors provide on the book's web site. I especially like the Excel spreadsheets that you can download to use in conjunction with material in nearly every chapter.Overall, this is one more of a series of books on various aspects of performance and capacity management. I also recommend reading their companion book, "Scaling for E-Business: Technologies, Models, Performance, and Capacity Planning" (ISBN 0130863289), which covers the applications level of e-commerce systems and seamlessly complements the material in this book.