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
Free companion download
The Risk Matrix Template
The Risk Matrix is the tool at the center of the book's risk management chapters. This is the working spreadsheet, laid out and ready to fill in with your own systems, with one worked example to show how each column is used.
Download the template (.xlsx)No signup required.
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 and author who helps companies architect and operate AI-powered SaaS at scale. At Amazon, he helped rearchitect the retail website and built AWS Elastic Beanstalk. He led architecture for New Relic's fast-growing SaaS platform and served as CTO of an AI company. He wrote Architecting for Scale (O'Reilly) and publishes Software Architecture Insights.
Get the book
Also available through Safari Books Online and your local library. Published by O'Reilly Media.