DevOps Reading List

Books

The seminal book. Teaches the key principles through a highly readable story. If you haven’t read this, you won’t know what’s going on when people say “X is a bit of a Brent”

The foundational work on continuous integration and continuous delivery. Both Dave Farley and Jez Humble are fantastic speakers if you ever get the chance.

Great introduction to Lean principles from a wider perspective than IT – like the Phoenix Project, it reads as a novel.

Google’s alternative framing of DevOps. Some interesting ideas, and worth reading just so you understand how the term SRE actually involves a lot more than its descent into common usage might indicate. Free online also.

Beginners in DevOps think its all about learning a sometimes horrifying amount of new tools and skills. With experience, people think it is about culture and people.

But, darlings of whatever level, you better get *real* good at Bash. Inside out and back to front.

A relatively new entry to the field, and too early to get the ‘classic’ recommendation that the other books on my list have, but if you are in a siloed “DevOps Team” or have the specific problem of helping large organizations rethink the way their teams are working this book is well worth being aware of.

Online Resources

  • Jeff Bezos’ 2002 email telling people that all Amazon services would henceforth be implemented as externalisable services. Teams that did not do this would be fired.
  • Site collecting resources on Trunk Based Development. Pretty soon in your DevOps career, you are going to be lectured by developers about complex branching strategies looking something like GitFlow. In my experience, there is a strong correlation between the vehemence with which GitFlow is advocated, and the dogs dinner of abandoned branches, failing pipelines and poorly tagged releases that you end up with. And surely if the authors of CI/CD are asking questions, we should be open to change?
  • SS64. Fast, authoritative reference to all the main scripting tools.
  • Puppet State of DevOps Report. This content is endlessly recycled by consultancies (and me) – required reading.
  • Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2021 – note the top two non-managerial roles: site reliability engineer and DevOps specialist.

The DevOps Roadmap

There’s no shortage of things to learn in this field …

Source: DevOps Roadmap: Learn to become a DevOps Engineer or SRE

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