Césarini and Vinoski's guide to building fault-tolerant systems with Erlang/OTP. Even if you never write Erlang, the mental models for fault-tolerance and concurrency are outstanding.

Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP is the book that changed how I think about fault tolerance. I don't write Erlang, but the mental models in this book—supervision trees, let it crash, process isolation—apply to any system that needs to be resilient. The chapter on supervision trees showed me why our microservices kept cascading failures: we weren't isolating failures properly, and one service going down took everything with it. The section on hot code swapping gave me ideas for zero-downtime deployments in other languages, and the chapter on distributed systems helped me understand why some architectures are more resilient than others. The book is technical—you'll need to understand concurrency and distributed systems—but the concepts are explained clearly. My only critique is that some of the Erlang-specific details won't apply if you're not using the language, but the principles are worth it. I've recommended it to developers working on distributed systems, and they've all said it helped them think about fault tolerance differently. Essential reading for anyone building systems that need to stay up.

Césarini and Vinoski's guide to fault-tolerant systems with Erlang/OTP. Supervision trees, process isolation, and let-it-crash. Patterns apply beyond Erlang.

Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP: Fault-Tolerant

Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP: Implement Robust, Fault-Tolerant Systems

Michael Nygard's definitive guide for production hardening, resilience, and real-world failures. Learn how to design systems that survive in production, not just work in development.

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.

Michael Nygard's guide to production hardening, resilience, and real-world failures. Learn to design systems that survive in production.

Release It! Design & Deploy Production-Ready Software

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

Hand-picked resilience tools and resources we actually use in production. Each item tested by developers, for developers.

Resilience Products

Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP: Implement Robust, Fault-Tolerant Systems

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