Preface

Faster! Faster! Faster!! Everybody wants to go faster but few know how. The demands of the marketplace are accelerating and the size of the opportunity increasing but some of us are just not able to keep up! What separates the traditional enterprise from the likes of Amazon, Netflix and Etsy? We know that these companies have grown to insane scale and yet, somehow, they still retain their competitive edge and stay well ahead of the competition. How?

It takes a lot of work to move an idea from concept to customer. To see an idea evolve to the point of utility, of value. Work moves through a lot of different stations on its way to production, from product management to user experience to developers, testing, and then over to operations. Historically, work slows at every one of these stations. Over time, as a community, we’ve optimized different parts of the process. We have cloud computing, so no longer need to rack-and-stack services. We use test-driven development and continuous integration to automate testing. We release software in small batches—microservices—to reduce the scope of change and the cost of change. We embrace the ideas behind devops—weaponized empathy—to foster a holistic perspective of the system and a sense of camaraderie between developers and operations, reducing the agonizing cost of misaligned priorities. Any of these things in of themselves is interesting, and an improvement over what they replace. But taken together, these things let us isolate ...

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