I’m excited to say that The Architecture of Open Source Applications (vol2) is now available.

This book is a collection of great chapters, each written by different people from different aspects of the open source world. For armenzg, catlee, lsblakk and myself, this was a great opportunity to write a chapter describing the release automation behind Mozilla’s Firefox.

If you were ever curious about the process (and the code!) that allow us to do things like sim-ship a Firefox release in 93 locales, or lets us ship 8 emergency chemspill releases in 42 hours, then please have a read. Hopefully, this might also help others who are doing release automation at scale for other products. If you find a typo in the book, or something that you think could be improved in our automation, please be kind and let us know.

Our release automation constantly evolves, as new product requirements arise or we find new ways to obsessively streamline things, so it’ll be interesting to see how this chapter holds up over time.

In addition to the print version (buy here), the book will soon also be available for purchase as a PDF, for purchase as ebook from Amazon and as a free html download (links coming). All royalties go to Amnesty International.

Big thanks to Greg Wilson and Amy Brown who did a great job of making all this happen, explaining mysteries of the book publishing world to us, and generally cat herding armenzg, catlee, lsblakk and myself through the publishing process, within deadlines, all while also doing our “day jobs” at Mozilla.

(Interesting coincidence: kmoir, who recently joined us at Mozilla’s RelEng, is an author of a chapter in the earlier Architecture of Open Source Applications (vol1) – another interesting read.)

Thank you Armen, Chris and Lukas for helping make this book a reality.