Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

This book is amazing.

If you are a person who is responsible for the operations, uptime, stability, responsibity of the system you write, or you are a developer who is being told you should care, this is the book for you.

It goes into understanding your system not just as the little piece of code you write but as a large thing with many moving parts that someone has to care about. It shows what to care about in the large ,but also how you can take that care and convert it into decisions and designs to make down at the individual component level.

All this time it's filled with lived experience, and the book is 100% designed for he practical, not the idealogical or theoretical.

Like probably many people, I became a devops person because I was show more the sucker who wasn't afraid of deploying the code on a unix server or who wasn't afraid to debug a working system in the late evening. As such I didn't have a formal or even learned ops background. This book is one of the things this year that I feel has actually qualified me to say I'm an ops person and not just a dev who plays one from time to time. show less

Great companion to Continuous Delivery. Covers more of the development and architecture side of things and, again, should be required reading for every architect and senior developer.

Don't agree with everything he says about database deployment; declarative development is much more useful than trying to code state transitions, especially when structure is in transition.

It was written in 2007, and it is starting to show its age in several respects. Despite this, there is still a lot of relevant advice on how to make software work well in production.

For me, the best parts of the book were the cases studies, and the recommendations in the Stability chapters. There is some repetition in parts of the book, and it feels a bit dated at times. For example, several issues in the last chapter, like monitoring and continuous delivery seem to have become standard practice by now. Nevertheless, it is a worthwhile read, especially these days when more and more developers also operate the systems they develop.

Full review on my blog: https://henrikwarne.com/2016/10/27/book-review-release-it/

A little disorganized, but for some reason I found this to be a really engaging book. How we'd actually be able to implement and "scale down" some of these tips to an organization of the size I work for isn't entirely clear. Obviously a good framework can make debugging and troubleshooting much easier, but there's also a level of expertise needed. It would have been interesting to see what experience he recommends as well or approaches for internal training.

The author is skewed towards Java and Unix machines, but it's not at a level where it interferes with the book. (Although I've used Java and I also use Unix/Linux machines so I'm a bit of a bad sample).

I'm tempted to give this book another read.

Michael nails it.

A must-read book for any software developer.