Release It!, 2nd Edition

How This Book Is Organized

The book is divided into four parts, each introduced by a case study. Part I: Create Stability shows you how to keep your systems alive, maintaining system uptime. Despite promises of reliability through redundancy, distributed systems exhibit availability more like “two eights” rather than the coveted “five nines.” Stability is a necessary prerequisite to any other concerns. If your system falls over and dies every day, nobody cares about anything else. Short-term fixes—and short-term thinking—will dominate in that environment. There’s no viable future without stability, so we’ll start by looking at ways to make a stable base.

After stability, the next concern is ongoing operations. In Part II: Design for Production, ...