
Release It!
by Michael T. Nygard · first published 2007
32mentions
22recommended by
27HN commenters
2009–2026first – last mentioned
81% recommend19% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Practical stability patterns like circuit breaker and bulkhead for building production-ready systems and avoiding cascading failures; suits engineers building servers or distributed systems, though examples are Java.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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…business vs. just building out technical solutions. Note: Buy this book used and save yourself a lot of money. I got it for $2.58. https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Minds-Technology-Officers-Peop... 4. Release It! - A very good book that talks about important concepts in building systems that can be released often. It talks about things like Bulkheads, and circuit breakers; also mentioned in Sam Newmans book,.…
on “Ask HN: What technical books are you reading?” ↗If you are writing server software, I recommend Michael Nygard's book "Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software". Measuring event loop lag sounds like Nygard's "Circuit Breaker" pattern to avoid cascading failures. The book's examples and text are all Java, but the…
on “Building A Node.js Server That Won't Melt” ↗I first read about this in the excellent book Release it! http://www.amazon.com/Release-Production-Ready-Software-Prag... . It's an really interesting read, and kind of a proto-devops book.
on “Circuit Breaker Design Pattern” ↗…Structures * Head First Java * Think Java * Clean Code * Pragmatic Programmer * Effective Java * Refactoring * Java Concurrency in Practice * Test Driven * Head First Design Patterns * Release It! * Kotlin in Action * Spring in Action * Spring Boot in Action * Cloud Native Java * Spring Microservices in Action * Learning Spring Boot 2.0 Feel free to add more suggestions for the list.…
on “Best Java Books in 2019” ↗I also enjoyed: * Release It! by Michael Nygard * System Design Interview by Alex Xu
on “Ask HN: Best books on modern distributed systems” ↗Release It!: Design and deploy production-ready software, a book by Michael T. Nygard This book is around 380 pages, but an amazing read for everyone working on creating softwares.
on “Ask HN: What are the best short tech/engineering books you have read?” ↗I like the Circuit Breaker as a stability pattern. It is also explained very good in "Release It!" by Michael T. Nygard ( http://pragprog.com/book/mnee/release-it )
on “Circuit Breaker” ↗Here are three books you might find interesting: * The Pragmatic Programmer, by Dave Thomas & Andy Hunt * Scalability Rules, by Marty Abbott & Michael Fisher * Release It!, by Michael Nygard
on “Ask HN: How would you, a solo dev/small team, make a scalable web app in 2022?” ↗…strongly with the premise of this article. Unexpected or unnoticed bottlenecks and localized issues can lead to cascading failures. A book I read more than a decade ago helped me learn about this stuff: Release It! by Michael T. Nygard. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/release-it/978168050026... I am wondering if the information contained within is really dated now, but I am not really sure. I believe that…
on “Big Problems and Small Problems under load” ↗…Goose Book") * Modern Java in Action - Raoul-Gabriel Urma * Java Concurrency in Practice - Brian Goetz * Grokking Algorithms - Aditya Y. Bhargava Architecture: * Righting Software - Juval Lowy * Release It! - Michael Nygard * Site Reliability Engineering - Beyer, et al. ("The SRE Book”) * Domain Driven Design - Eric Evans * Introduction to Permaculture - Bill Mollison and Mia Slay * Fun with a Pencil…
on “Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies” ↗I would recommend Release It! by Michael T. Nygard first edition, the second edition talks about microservices
on “Ask HN: What are good books on SW architecture that don't sell microservices?” ↗…lot more valuable gets you in the door as a junior. A (the?) classic talk on the subject of boring technology is Dan McKinley's http://boringtechnology.club/ Another interesting read is Nygard's book "Release It!" about designing and building reliable systems, although it might be hard to understand the importance of some of these topics without first spending a few years in an organisation maintaining and operating…
on “Ask HN: How to Create “Boring” Software?” ↗…seems to have boldly gone straight into a tortured metaphor, but the topic is interesting. If you're interested in reading more about hardening software for production, I highly recommend checking out Release It! by Michael Nygard.
on “To Boldly Go Where No Production Application Has Gone Before” ↗…layer and service in an application should be able to manage its own load. Helps prevent cascading failures too. Read up on Netflix's architecture, where they've talked about this a lot. And the book "Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software" (Nygard), though Java-oriented in its examples, covers the concepts well.
on “Building A Node.js Server That Won't Melt” ↗Release It! by Micheal Nygard. Excellent advice and patterns about building robust software.
on “Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?” ↗