Book Review: Release It!

Should I read it?

I'll cut right to the chase. Here are the main reasons I can think of that you would want to read this book:

• You are a developer who would like to expand their knowledge of operations and live systems support.
• You want to see why DevOps is so important without the DevOps buzzword baggage.
• You like case studies of system failures and how the root cause is found and resolved.
• You want to learn from someone else's mistakes and build resilient systems that scale under load in production.
• You want to help your organization frame its discussions around performance and scalability so they are more productive and fact rather than fear based.
• You heard about cool software patterns like Timeouts and Circuit breakers and you want to see what all the hubbub is about.

Book review

The book Release It! by Michael Nygard has been on my reading list for a long time. It was mentioned by many blogs that I read and it has always intrigued me but I never sat down and read it until recently.

The first thing that jumped out at me was Michael's informal tone for the book. His friendly and often divergent thoughts are presented in a way that feels less like proselytizing and more like a caring mentor who has been through some tough experiences and has come out the other side wiser and willing to share the lessons with you.

The book is more concept than code sample but there are plenty of code samples out there for the concepts presented. It's no surprise the Circuit Breaker pattern has become the "Hello world" of distributed programming. It's a simple pattern that is fun and easy to implement in any language.

The books appeals to my generalist leaning as is moves between application, server, and release management. Its holistic approach opens up plenty of topics for you to talk over with your local sysadmin.

I have come to consider this book a must-read for anyone wanting to produce quality software.