Preface

The idea for this book started when I came to understand how hard it is to hire engineers and technical leaders to work at scale. By scale I mean having tens of millions of users and hundreds of millions of requests hitting your site. Before I started working on properties on the national stage, these would have been DDOS numbers. At these numbers, HTTP requests start stacking up, and users start getting turned away. At these numbers, objects start to accumulate, and the heap starts to run out of memory in minutes. At these numbers, even just logging can cause your machines to run out of file handles.

Unless you are working or have worked at this scale, you haven’t run into the issues and scenarios that come up when running a web application nationally or globally. To compound the issue, no one was talking about these specific issues; or if they were, they were focusing on different aspects of the problem. Things like scaling at the backend, resiliency, and virtual machine (VM) tuning are all important topics and get the lion’s share of the coverage. Very few people are actually talking about utilizing cache tiers to scale at the frontend. It was just a learned skill for those of us that had been living and breathing it, which meant it was hard to find that skill in the general population.

So I set about writing a book that I wish I had when I started working on my projects. As such the goal of this book is not to be inclusive of all facets of the industry, web development, the HTTP specification, or CDN capabilities. It is to simply to share my own learnings and experience on this subject, maybe writing to prepare a future teammate.

What this book is:

• A discussion about the principals of scaling on the frontend
• An introduction to high-level concepts around cache and utilizing cache to add a buffer to protect your infrastructure from enormous scale
• A primer on benefits of adding a CDN to your frontend scaling strategy
• A reflection of my own experiences, both the benefits that I’ve seen, and issues that I have run into and how I dealt with them

What this book is not:

• An exhaustive look at all caching strategies
• An in-depth review of CDN capabilities
• A representation of every viewpoint in the field

I hope that my experiences are useful and that you are able to learn something and maybe even bring new strategies to your day-to-day problems.