Practice of Cloud System Administration, The: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services, Volume 2

System Administrators are not known for consensus and conformity. It doesn't take long for new admins to fall in love with a tool or a programming language (or to fall into hate). The Editor Wars are probably the most well known on-going dividing line, but faults can appear around any choice we can make.This is what makes the books by Limoncelli, Chalup and Hogan (LC&H) so remarkable. If you ask most sysadmins what single book they shouldread, the answer will almost certainly be "The Practice of System and Network Administration". They're going to have a harder time now, with the release of Volume 2: "The Practice of Cloud System Administration". (Just so you know, it's already known by the abbreviation TPOCSA) I think this is likely to become a must-read.One of the tenets of TPOCSA (and of all quality design) is "Keep it Simple"). The authors present cloud administration in two parts. Pretty simple, eh? First they define the characteristics of their ideal system, then they go on to describe the methods that they use to try to achieve that ideal.When I say "describes the system" I mean that in a somewhat abstract way. LC&H aren't talking about which database is best or how muchmemory you need to render a movie frame. It turns out that all large scale distributed systems have a set of common characteristics. These,along with the requirements for high reliability and robustness have lead to a set of best practices that have become generally accepted largely because they have been shown to work. The hitch is that most of them seem counter-intuitive and nearly all directly contradict standard practices of two decades ago.In this section the authors also make clear the scope of what "System Administration" means. Up until the advent of virtualization andubiquitous high-speed networks it meant OS installation, and some network configuration. When the machine was ready it would be handedoff to some application and operations team for the rest of the lifetime of a host. The SA tasks would probably include backups andperiodic patching. (or at least that's what many people thought). Today System Administration and Operations are largely synonymous. This union even has a word: DevOps (which *is* contentious, so I won't discuss it further here).So we're talking about a large-scale distributed system. When ever you have something big and made up of lots of parts you inevitablyhave failures. Much of the rest of the book consists of ways to make that not matter, taking human nature and the "physics" of highlycomplex systems into account to make robust seamless services which run well even as they are changing.Scanning over the chapter headings after the section break I am struck by something which should have been obvious. This is a book aboutPractices. The first section is really a glossary, a base of terminology and concepts on which to build. But what we build fromthem, the system which results isn't just the our cloud application. The infrastructure that LC&H are talking about here is as much asocial one as it is technical. Each of the computational components is meant either to facilitate human communication or to removepainful, time consuming or error prone tasks.System Administrators are no longer just brick layers and janitors.They are involved in every phase of application life-cycle frominception to a long continuously evolving life span. LC&H discuss the philosphy and practice of each phase, always considering that humansare expensive (and error prone) while computation is cheap. Automation, documentation and monitoring are all reconsidered with an eye to minimizing drudgery and false rigor and replacing it with a mind-set that will evaluate what's really important: comprehension and communication.I read Gene Kim's "The Phoenix Project" not long after it came out while I smiled and nodded knowingly all the way through, it felt a little like a unicorn story. I thought "This is nice, but no one in business is going to take a novel seriously as a model for business practice". Of course I was wrong, but I still think that something more is needed, not just a parable but a manual. The line where the authors cite Gene for "inspiration and encouragement" indicates that LC&H thought so too.There really wasn't much in this book that was new to me. I think much of what's here is already fairly common knowledge. What TPOCSA has done is to bring together in one place the accumulated body of knowledge which has been growing and changing since the birth of theInternet. Today's computer systems are a far from the mainframes, minicomputers and PCs which dominated the 1990s. There have been anumber of movements triggered by the changes since then; Agile development, the DevOps movement, Continuous Integration andDeployment. TPOCSA brings them all together and reminds us that the methodology, the philosophy, the ideology are not what matters. TheSystem, running and serving reliably is what matters. All of the rest are just means to that end.So who should read it? I think anyone claiming to be a System Administrator today should be conversant with what's here, but I thinkthe bigger impact will come when we pass it to a colleague, whether a developer or a manager. There's a lot of confusion around what Cloud Computing means, and TPOCSA gives us a common base on which to build our systems and our processes.

Very good!Similar quality to the previous book by this team, The Practice of System and Network Administration, this book offers both a solid overview and a good list of "must do" steps to build and maintain a well thought out environment. Focusing on reliability, loose coupling and scalability this is, in my opinion, a must have book for system administrators who are following the evolutionary path to "DevOps" and "The Cloud", neither of which are really new practices as much as the convergence of things that folks have been doing for years.Not just for people who are moving applications to AWS/Google/Rackspace etc, this book is somewhat more general, aiming at administration where the Service, not the underlying infrastructure, is the focus. A good thing since that's where the benefits to the business actually live.Solid methods to measure your organization's current state and how to track your path to becoming more effective, with terms and metrics that your upper management folks are probably already familiar with. Not just technical or high level discussion but how to navigate the path from what you want to do to getting there.This book is already one of my top 4 resources (along with The Practice of System and Network Administration, Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook, Visible Ops) for high level administration. If you are interested in implementing or improving your operations this is a book for you.

Is this book really about cloud system administration? I thumbed through it and there is only one place where Amazon AWS was mentioned. It's pretty much high-level conceptual overview of the issues that one would typically encounter with traditional distributed systems. I returned the book to Amazon as I was looking for cloud-specific best practices, for example, in context of a few major cloud services providers. The authors are great professionals, but I feel that the book just used the new fashion word of "cloud" in its title, which is misleading.

Wow, this book is fantastic! I am a software developer who has spent his career up to this point working on writing applications. I wanted to learn the big picture of dev-ops, distributed computing, caching, load balancing and other system-level stuff. This book doesn't disappoint. It really explains things well and shows you how to think about this stuff. I've been learning tools like Vagrant and Chef, but this book is great for putting it all into context.

The title mentions Cloud administration, but this book is much more than that. The concepts covered here are excellent foundational IT operational ideas that are relevant to legacy IT systems. This is a great complement to the SRE book from Google Engineers. This book should be read by every IT leader who is interested in operating a high functioning team.

The first part is the best treatment I've seen of several crucial architecture and design patterns for large-scale systems (Cloud or otherwise). The second part is a useful survey of best practices in modern operations, including devops. I doubt this book (or any other single book!) will be enough to make great architecture and best practices "magically happen" in your own organization, but this is certainly excellent material to motivate you to *be* that change, convince others, and start on the path of improvement that eventually leads you there.