If you’re in the market for the best DevOps books, then you’re in luck because we’ve reviewed the TOP 11 DevOps books here for you, so you don’t have to look elsewhere.
The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win | Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford, et al.
Author’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/RealGeneKim
Publisher: IT Revolution Press; 3 edition
Publication date: February 6, 2018
Pages: 432 pages
If you tried searching for the best DevOps books, you won’t be surprised that The Phoenix project made it to the top of this list: it’s recommended virtually anywhere, making this book an absolute hit among the DevOps must-reads.
The link to Amazon will lead you to the 5th Anniversary edition of The Phoenix Project which contains a new afterword and a deeper delve into the Three Ways as described in the DevOps Handbook (which we’ll cover in a moment).
So what’s the book about and why did the authors name it as a “novel?” The Phoenix Project describes the unfortunate IT manager named Bill and his exploits on embarking on a serious project believed to be critical for the business but weightily over budget and behind all possible deadlines. Bill’s given 90 days to fix the mayhem or … (wait for it) his whole department will be outsourced, Bill including. Bill starts organizing workflow streamline interdepartmental communications and serves other business functions trying to find out real-world solutions to the problems he faces.
The authors, three DevOps’s luminaries, know the subject of their research all too well: Gene Kim is an award-winning CTO, researcher, and author, and previously the CTO of Tripwire, a company he founded, where he worked with the top Internet corporations; Kevin Behr is the founder of the Information Technology Process Institute (ITPI) and an advisor to the top IT organizations; George Spafford is Research Director for Gartner, a prolific author, and speaker.
The reviewers are generally very positive with just a few exceptions where people complained about the unrealistic portrayal of a guy who instead of walking out the door of a bureaucratic company with inherently bad politics and inferior management and joining much better company (because let’s be honest, opportunities for tech are incessant at the moment), stays there and tries to fix things, that is DevOps, on his own, alone. Sounds impossible and hard to believe, right? Others mention that the book looks at DevOps from the Ops perspective with ignoring Dev side altogether, or that some of the events or actions described in the book happen as if by magic. You’ve ever encountered magic in DevOps? Probably not.
The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations | Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois
Author’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/RealGeneKim
Publisher: IT Revolution Press
Publication date: October 6, 2016
Pages: 480 pages
Another major work by the same leading author, Gene Kim, yet with the other few writers such Jez Humble and Patrick Debois. Jez Humble is also an award-winning author, researcher, teacher at UC Berkeley, as a co-founder of DevOps Research and Assessment LLC. Patrick Debois is an IT-consultant specializing in Agile development, project management, and system administration. The book is essentially a sequel to The Phoneix Project described above, which explains the intricacies of DevOps and the whys, whereas the Handbook explains the hows of DevOps, how exactly the Three Ways (flow, feedback, continuous learning) are implemented in practice. The book’s primary objective is to show/teach how to integrate Product Management, Development, QA, IT Operations, and Information Security seamlessly and productively so as to elevate the company and ultimately win the marketplace. The reviewers especially mention their appreciation of the writers’ explanation of how information flows back from production environments to development via telemetry and A/B testing. Others specifically praise various case studies from the companies with the most mature DevOps practices as well as an appendix prolific in links and references which readers can use to delve further into the subject matter.
Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations | Forsgren, Nicole, Jez Humble, Gene Kim
Author’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/RealGeneKim
Publisher: IT Revolution Press
Publication date: March 27, 2018
Pages: 288 pages
Another book by almost the same authors, plus Dr. Nicole Forsgren, who does research and strategy at Google Cloud following by acquisition of her startup, DevOps Research and Assessment, by Google. Forsgren is best known for her investigative work on the largest DevOps studies to date. She’s also a professor, performance engineer, and system administrator. The book essentially derives its conclusions from the four years of research that includes the data from the State of DevOps reports conducted with Puppet, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim, which the researchers (and writers of this book) conducted using rigorous statistical methods in search of the best way to measure software delivery performance and what it drives. The book includes both the findings and the science behind them, which makes the readers understand the concepts better and apply those findings in their own organizations.
The reviewers were generally pleased with the research findings, the writing, the explanations, however, the few still have something to complain about like the theoretical rather than practical side to some of the book’s propagated ideas such as allowing developers choose their own tools, whereas in practice it’s not always possible; others complained that the book was not engaging enough; still others said that the book had little of a guide in it but rather a report. Overall, most of the readers were satisfied with what they learned from the book.
Principles of Network and System Administration| Mark Burgess
Publisher: Wiley
Publication date: February 13, 2004
Pages: 646 pages
Mark Burgess is a theoretical physicist turned computer scientist. His writing is not limited to computer science or physics, though, but spans from fiction and poetry to some serious research in science to philosophical discourses on modern informational culture which he shares on his blog. Principles of Network and System Administration, though, focuses on general principles involved in setting up, configuring, and maintaining computer communities, which have long been recognized by both academia and industry experts to be in desperate need of logical, efficient, easy-to-upgrade, and secure organization practices. The book also tackles questions of adopting and integrating more sophisticated technologies as the industry continually evolves bringing more challenges to those working in system administration. Burgess doesn’t only cover the theory of integrational or organizational concepts but also gives plenty of practical examples nourished with written illustrations of specific operating systems. Burgess goes even beyond that and finishes on a highly moralistic note of the importance of being ethically responsible. Although I’ve seen this book praised elsewhere, on Amazon, it has received just one review to date, which is not very helpful except that it was five stars. In case you happen to read a book, drop a note below in the comments, and let us know what you think.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Practice Tests 2019 and Training Notes 2019 | Neal Davis
Author’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/nealkdavis
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Publication date: July 10, 2019 (for tests) and March 12, 2019 (for training notes)
Pages: 646 pages for tests and 247 pages for training notes
These are the most up-to-date learning materials on preparing for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam, both published in 2019. The author of those handbooks is Neal Davis, the founder of Digital Cloud Training, an AWS Cloud Solutions Architect, best-selling author and successful IT instructor with over 20 years of experience in the tech industry. Neal is the founder of digitalcloud.training, which provides a variety of certification training resources for AWS. The test handbook contains six practice exams with 65 questions covering the five domains of the AWS exam and prepares you for the latest SAA-C01 exam that’s composed entirely of scenario-based questions. The training notes contain the exam objectives with over 240 pages of detailed facts, tables, and diagrams, familiarization with the exam question format and the practice questions included in each section, access to online exam simulator where you evaluate your progress in real-time. The readers particularly praised the conciseness of the book which doesn’t comprise the overall content and detailed explanations of some of the more complex concepts and scenarios. Some say that a training book is the only resource you’ll need to prepare for an exam as it contains everything you’ll need to pass it.
Building Microservices | Sam Newman
Author’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/samnewman
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
Publication date: February 2, 2015
Pages: 280 pages
Newman is an independent consultant who focuses on Microservices, cloud, and CD. Building Microservices is his first book, which was for quite a while already, his new book is coming later this year, Monolith To Microservices. Building Microservices is not only about, well, smaller-sized services, but also a book on modern distributed systems architecture. This book, along with many examples and practical advice, takes a holistic view of the topics that system administrators and architects must consider when building, managing, and evolving microservice architecture. Although this book is quite dated, it’s still could be quite indispensable in learning the grounding concepts and gaining a solid knowledge of modeling, integrating, testing, deploying, and monitoring autonomous services.
DevOps For Web Development | Mitesh Soni
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Publication date: October 24, 2016
Pages: 408 pages
Soni is a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Certified Jenkins Engineer (CJE), SCJP, SCWCD, VCP, IBM Urbancode, and IBM Bluemix certified professional. This book is for a system administrator, application, or web application developer, who has a basic knowledge of programming and wants to get hands-on with tools such as Jenkins 2 and Chef, and Cloud platforms such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, Docker, New Relic, Nagios, and their modules to host, deploy, monitor, and manage their web applications. The reviewers comment on the overall usefulness of the book and its practicability in terms of learning how to use all of the common DevOps tools. This book again is super dated in the fast-paced IT world, but people seem to like it despite it being 2016. One reviewer, though, mentioned, that the book was quite basic for him and didn’t cover a lot in DevOps as he originally expected.
Infrastructure as Code | Kief Morris
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
Publication date: June 9, 2016
Pages: 362 pages
Kief Morris has been designing, building, and running automated IT server infrastructure for more than twenty years using multiple technologies as the industry evolved, among those are shell scripts and Perl, CFengine, Puppet, Chef, and Ansible, among others. This book is essentially a practical guide that aims to teach how to effectively use principles, practices, and patterns pioneered through the DevOps movement to manage cloud age infrastructure. If you’re a system administrator, infrastructure engineer, team lead or architect, this book is for you as it demonstrates various tools, techniques, and patterns you can use to implement infrastructure as a code. You’ll also learn about the pitfalls that organizations fall through when adopting the new generation of infrastructure technologies, the capabilities of service models of dynamic infrastructure platforms, multiple tools that provide, provision, and configure core infrastructure resources, as well as specific patterns and practices for provisioning servers, building server templates, and updating running servers.
The DevOps Adoption Playbook: A Guide to Adopting DevOps in a Multi-Speed IT Enterprise | Jennifer Davis, Ryn Daniels
Author’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/sigje
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
Publication date: May 30, 2016
Pages: 410 pages
Jennifer Davis, the author of the DevOps Adoption Playbook, a global organizer for devopsdays and a local organizer for devopsdays Silicon Valley, as well as the founder of Coffeeops. Jennifer has been developing cookbooks to simplify building and managing infrastructure for the most part of her professional life. She’s also a prolific public speaker and often talks about DevOps, tech culture, monitoring, automation. Another co-author of the DevOps Adoption Playbook is an infrastructure operations engineer working at TravisCI. In this practical guide, the authors provided several approaches for improving collaboration, creating affinity within teams, promoting efficient tool usage, and scaling up what works for your company. Other areas the book covers include the foundations of DevOps with its four pillars, the importance of cultural direction in selecting and managing DevOps tools, troubleshooting the common problems and misunderstandings that arise within the organization, case studies from both companies and individuals to help you on your DevOps journey. As you may have noticed already, the book’s primary emphasis is on the organizational culture and creation of an atmosphere that’s suitable for the development of a solid DevOps practice rather than anything else: the authors put a lot of focus on the importance of team, teamwork, and diversity. The premise of the book can, therefore, be summarized as the building up DevOps from the ground up not as a standard company’s practice but as a cultural change that incorporates and touches all members of the team.
The Digital Quality Handbook: Guide for Achieving Continuous Quality in a DevOps Reality | Eran Kinsbruner
Author’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/ek121268
Publisher: Infinity P
Publication date: April 28, 2017
Pages: 336 pages
Eran Kinsbruner is the chief evangelist at Perfecto and the author of ‘The Digital Quality Handbook’ and ‘Continuous Testing for DevOps Professionals’, as well as a monthly columnist at the Enterprisers Project. He’s also a software engineer with lots of industry certifications, a prolific public speaker, and a patent-holding inventor for a test exclusion automated mechanism for mobile J2ME testing. In the Digital Quality Handbook, the author tackles questions surrounding the software development life cycle, various DevOps tools, quality, processes maturity, testing, coping with existing limitations, using open source tools and frameworks, and getting proper quality insights, among many other issues around DevOps.
Designing Distributed Systems: Patterns and Paradigms for Scalable, Reliable Services | Brendan Burns
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
Publication date: February 20, 2018
Pages: 166 pages
Brendan Burns, a Partner Architect in Microsoft Azure, ex-Googler, where he co-founded the Kubernetes project and helped build APIs like Deployment Manager and Cloud DNS for the Google Cloud Platform. Burn has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a specialty in Robotics. Designing Distributed Systems is about adapting existing software design patterns for designing and building reliable distributed applications. The author covers such topics as patterns and reusable components and how they enable the rapid development of reliable distributed systems, explores loosely coupled multi-node distributed patterns for replication, scaling, and communication between the components explains distributed system patterns for large-scale batch data processing covering work-queues, event-based processing, and coordinated workflows. This is quite a short book spanning only over 150 pages, so a lot of readers found the book to be quite shallow, mentioning that it rather seemed to be a promotional material of Kubernetes rather than a solid book on DevOps.
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