Great book: Release It! by Michael T. Nygard
David Lebutsch
Director of Engineering IBM Cloud Data Services, IBM Distinguished Engineer, IBM R&D Germany
It took me a vacation to finally finish reading Michael T. Nygard’s book ‘Release It!’.
What a great read, filled with stories, anecdotes and fun references to my favorite movies, from Star Wars to Spinal Tap. I recommend this book to anyone who is NOT in the business of simply writing programs and throwing them over the fence - for someone else to do the real work, of deploying and operating them. If you are a manager, product owner or another non coding person this book is also very important to you. Just skip over the coding parts and read part IV, Chapter 16 on Process and Organization extra carefully.
This book is for those of us, who wake up every morning and ask ourselves:
- Are users receiving a good experience?
- Is the system creating the economic value we want?
Do any of these quotes resonate with you? Then the book is for you:
- Software delivers value in production, everything before production is prelude.
- Nobody should buy anything from a software vendor who ‘optimizes development cost at the expense of operational cost’. (Obviously SaaS vendors don’t do that …)
- ‘Planned downtime’ is an anti pattern.
- Change is guaranteed, survival is not.
- The (CICD) pipeline to production is not just a set of development tools. It is the production environment that developers use to produce value.
- Always design for deployment.
The book walks us through accepting that failures will inevitably happen. It helps us to understand how to design, build and deliver services to improve the survivability in the face of those failures. It walks us through many anti patterns, from design, engineering, cultural to organizational.
If you have learned SaaS the hard way, such as I did, reading the book will make you smile, because you have either been there or currently are facing the challenges described today.
PS: I am still laughing at: ‘Tester walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 99999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a sfdeljknesv’.