Release It!, 2nd Edition

Help Others Handle Your Versions

It won’t come as a surprise to learn that different consumers of your service have different goals and needs. Each consuming application has its own development team that operates on its own schedule. If you want others to respect your autonomy, then you must respect theirs. That means you can’t force consumers to match your release schedule. They shouldn’t have to make a new release at the same time as yours just so you can change your API. That is trivially true if you provide SaaS services across the Internet, but it also holds within a single organization or across a partner channel. Trying to coordinate consumer and provider deployments doesn’t scale. Follow the ripple effect from your deployment and you ...