Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (2nd Edition)

Release It! is the book I read after my first production incident that took down the entire service. Nygard's chapter on circuit breakers saved me from cascading failures, and the section on timeouts and retries helped me understand why our API calls were hanging. The second edition adds chapters on modern patterns like service meshes and chaos engineering, but the core content—stability patterns, capacity planning, deployment—is timeless. The book is full of war stories: real failures from real systems, and how to prevent them. The chapter on capacity planning gave me a framework for understanding when systems will break, and the section on deployment showed me why blue-green deployments matter. My only critique is that some examples feel dated, but the principles are sound. I've recommended it to developers who've never had to deal with production failures, and it's helped them understand why the code that works in development doesn't always work in production. Essential reading for anyone deploying software to real users.