We've been hearing about agile operations quite a bit lately. There have been some good talks, articles and a few lively debates. It has even been called the "secret sauce for startups". What about those of us who aren't in a startup or a Web 2.0 company? Is agile operations something that can really work inside a large, established enterprise?
Can refactoring and unit testing really create robust “working software” that survives the real world? In this story adapted from his book Release It! Michael Nygard contends that "abstractions leak": we need to attend to architecture, even in Agile projects, to guard ourselves against the 5AM failures that occur when foundational abstractions misbehave.
Michael Nygard encourages us to have a failure oriented mindset in order to succeed. He presents many anti-pattern examples that lead to systems instability and ultimately lead to failure. He also presents the corresponding stability patterns that should be used instead.
Michael Nygard on: feature complete vs. production ready, how to make a system more resilient and monitorable, explaining stability patterns like Bulkhead and Circuit Breaker, and the need for the development department to cooperate with the operations one and the business managers.
