Essential Resources to Learn About DevOps

July 11, 2019 7 min read

Whether you're new to DevOps or a seasoned DevOps practitioner, there's no denying that it's a fast-moving field where you need to stay educated. This is why we've collected some of the best DevOps resources for you to read, listen to, or subscribe to.

Additionally, X-Team is looking for developers who have experience in DevOps. If that's you, please feel free to send through your application!

9 Excellent DevOps Books 📚

One of the best and fastest ways to learn and comprehensively understand a topic is through reading books. These nine books will give you a thorough understanding of the many aspects of DevOps.

Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation

Authors: Jez Humble and David Farley

Publication Year: 2010

Length: 501 pages

Summary:

Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This book sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers, and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours, no matter the size of a project or the complexity of its code base.

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

Authors: Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford

Publication Year: 2013 (1st ed.) & 2018 (3rd ed.)

Length: 432 pages

Summary:

Bill, an IT manager at Parts Unlimited, has been tasked with taking on a project critical to the future of the business, code named Phoenix Project. But the project is massively over budget and behind schedule. The CEO demands Bill must fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill's entire department will be outsourced. Bill must streamline interdepartmental communications and effectively serve the other business functions at Parts Unlimited.

DevOps: A Software Architect's Perspective

Authors: Len Bass, Ingo Weber, Liming Zhu

Publication Year: 2015

Length: 353 pages

Summary:

DevOps promises to accelerate the release of new software features and improve monitoring of systems in production, but its crucial implications for software architects and architecture are often ignored. In this book, three leading architects address these issues head-on.

The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

Authors: Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis

Publication Year: 2016

Length: 480 pages

Summary:

More than ever, the effective management of technology is critical for business competitiveness. For decades, technology leaders have struggled to balance agility, reliability, and security. The DevOps Handbook shows leaders how to replicate the incredible outcomes of companies such as Netflix, Etsy, Facebook, and Amazon, by showing how to integrate Product Management, Development, QA, IT Operations, and Information Security to elevate your company.

Infrastructure as Code: Managing Servers in the Cloud

Author: Kief Morris

Publication Year: 2016

Length: 362 pages

Summary:

Virtualization, cloud, containers, server automation, and software-defined networking are meant to simplify IT operations. But, often, it only leads to a faster-growing sprawl of unmanageable systems. This is where infrastructure as code can help. With this practical guide, author Kief Morris of ThoughtWorks shows you how to effectively use principles, practices, and patterns pioneered through the DevOps movement to manage cloud age infrastructure.

The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit: Automating the Continuous Deployment Pipeline with Containerized Microservices

Author: Viktor Farcic

Publication Year: 2016

Length: 414 pages

Summary:

This book is about different techniques that help us architect software in a better and more efficient way, with microservices packed as immutable containers, tested and deployed continuously to servers that are automatically provisioned with configuration management tools. This book envelops the whole microservices development and deployment lifecycle using some of the latest and greatest practices and tools.

Practical DevOps: Implement DevOps in Your Organization by Effectively Building, Deploying, Testing, and Monitoring Code

Author: Joakim Verona

Publication Year: 2016 (1st ed.) & 2018 (2nd ed.)

Length: 250 pages

Summary:

Practical DevOps begins with a quick refresher on DevOps and continuous delivery and quickly moves on to show you how DevOps affects software architectures. You'll create a sample enterprise Java application that you’ll continue to work with through the remaining chapters. Following this, you will explore various code storage and build server options. You will then learn how to test your code with a few tools and deploy your test successfully. In addition to this, you will also see how to monitor code for any anomalies and make sure that it runs as expected.

Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale

Authors: Jennifer Davis, Ryn Daniels

Publication Year: 2016

Length: 410 pages

Summary:

Some companies think that adopting DevOps means bringing in specialists or a host of new tools. With this practical guide, you’ll learn why DevOps is a professional and cultural movement that calls for change from inside your organization. DevOps stresses iterative efforts to break down information silos, monitor relationships, and repair misunderstandings that arise between and within teams in your organization.

Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations

Authors: Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim

Publication Year: 2018

Length: 288 pages

Summary:

For years, we've been told that the performance of software delivery teams doesn't matter―that it can't provide a competitive advantage to our companies. Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance―and what drives it―using rigorous statistical methods. This book presents both the findings and the science behind that research, making the information accessible for readers to apply in their own organizations.

5 Best DevOps Newsletters 📩

DevOps is a fast-moving field that produces an impossible amount of new information on a daily basis. These five newsletters cut through the noise and will keep you updated on the most important DevOps news.

DevOps Dispatch

A weekly publication full of articles and podcast episodes related to DevOps. Curated by Matty Stratton (who also hosts the Arrested DevOps podcast).

DevOps Weekly

Your weekly slice of DevOps news, curated by Gareth Rushgrove.

Kube News

Aggregating all the interesting weekly news about Kubernetes in the form of a newsletter.

Last Week in AWS

A newsletter to keep up with the huge number of AWS updates. Filters signal from noise to deliver you the news that's worth reading.

appopps reloaded

A newsletter to keep you up to date with all things containers, Kubernetes, Go, Rust, Linux, devops, cloud native apps, CI/CD, microservices, observability, Prometheus, AWS, Azure, GCP, serverless, FaaS, and security. Curated by Michael Hausenblas.

4 Great DevOps Podcasts 🎤

If you're more of a listener than a reader, then podcasts might be more your thing. Listen to DevOps news, best practices, tips, and hacks with these 4 great DevOps podcasts.

Arrested DevOps

Hosted by Bridget Kromhout, Jessica Kerr, Matty Stratton, and Trevor Hess, this podcast that helps you achieve an understanding, develop good practices, and operate your team and organization for max DevOps success.

DevOps Radio

This podcast dives into what it takes to successfully develop, deliver and deploy software in today’s ever-changing business environment. Sponsored by CloudBees.

DevOps and Docker Talk

Hosted by Bret Fisher, this podcast covers anything DevOps, Cloud management, sysadmin, Docker and container tools like Kubernetes and Swarm, and the full software lifecycle supply chain.

To Be Continuous

Hosted by Edith Harbaugh, CEO at LaunchDarkly, and Paul Biggar, Founder of CircleCI, this podcast is all about continuous delivery and software development.

5 Vibrant DevOps Communities

These 5 DevOps communities should cater to your needs if you're ever stuck on a problem that has no easy answer, if you're doubting what next to learn, or if you're simply looking for like-minded people.