O'Reilly Media — 2nd Edition
Build systems that stay up while they scale.
Architecting for Scale gives software architects and engineering leaders a practical framework for high availability, risk management, and cloud-native design. Updated for microservices, STOSA, and modern distributed systems.
Growth should be a good problem. It usually isn't.
You've built something people actually use. Now traffic is climbing, data is growing, and cracks are appearing where you least expect them. What worked at launch won't work at scale, and the cost of getting it wrong is measured in outages, lost customers, and frantic all-hands incidents at 2 a.m.
Most architecture books teach patterns. This one teaches you how to think: about availability, about risk, about the organizational forces that make scaling hard. Then it gives you concrete techniques to act on it.
A practical framework for systems that have to work.
"Don't bet against your business. Build as if being successful at scale is a foregone conclusion." Colin Bodell, VP Engineering, Shopify Plus
What the book covers
- How scaling changes service availability, and how to architect around those changes before they become incidents
- Service-based application design for high availability, including fault isolation and graceful degradation
- Single Team Owned Service Architecture (STOSA): scaling your organization alongside your system
- How to identify, measure, and reduce risk in distributed systems, with a free downloadable Risk Matrix Template
- Cloud architecture patterns that let you take full advantage of elastic, scalable infrastructure
What readers and leaders say
"A definitive guide for directors, managers, and architects who want an actionable roadmap on operating at scale."
-- Ken Gavranovic, former EVP & GM, New Relic
"Building systems with failure in mind is one of the keys to building highly scaled applications."
-- Patrick Franklin, EVP & CTO, American Express
"An excellent book to understand real-world paradigms for scaling and managing critical applications."
-- Ekaterina Novoseltseva, Apiumhub
"Don't bet against your business. Build as if being successful at scale is a foregone conclusion."
-- Colin Bodell, VP Engineering, Shopify Plus
About Lee Atchison
Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, and recognized voice on cloud computing and engineering leadership. He is the author of Architecting for Scale (O'Reilly) and Overcoming IT Complexity (O'Reilly), creator of multiple O'Reilly Media and LinkedIn Learning courses, and writer of the Software Architecture Insights newsletter. With more than three decades in the industry, including seven years at Amazon and AWS and eight at New Relic, Lee currently writes and consults through his practice, Atchison Technology. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
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