- Novel; Not your typical technical book
- Transformation of Broken Organization towards DevOps Culture
- Quintessential beginning of a DevOps journey
- Pros: Easy to digest, can suggest to executives
- Cons: The implementation details are fuzzy
- Quip: We all know Brent. Help Brent not be Brent.
- URL: https://itrevolution.com/book/the-phoenix-project/
- Handbook full of use cases and helpful examples
- Years of experience poured into one book
- The next step of a DevOps journey
- Pros: Detail oriented, can give to technical staff
- Cons: Not a quick read
- Quip: You're DevOps'ing if you quote this book.
- URL: https://itrevolution.com/book/the-devops-handbook/
- https://12factor.net/
- De facto standard for implementing software
- Good design principles for refactors and green field
- Pros: Free; Up-to-date; Roadmap
- Cons: State has to exist somewhere; lightly addressed
- Quip: If apps only had 12 factors...
- Developer centric cases and examples for releasing
- First edition out of print; second edition in December
- Technical af
- Pros: Looks at the SDLC holistically
- Cons: Not readily available yet
- Quip: Interesting that Release It! Isn't released yet.
- URL: https://pragprog.com/book/mnee/release-it
- Provides focus for deploying software faster
- Emphasizes automation (you must automate first)
- When John Willis says "shift left" he's talking about executing earlier in pipelines described in this book
- Pros: Clear, real-world
- Cons: Sometimes redundant, slightly dated
- Quip: CD for your CTO to improve ROI and EBITDA.
- URL: http://www.informit.com/store/continuous-delivery-reliable-software-releases-through-9780321601919
- A collection of essays from Google SREs about how things are done at Google
- A fantastic reference for various functions like on-call, onboarding, delivery, etc.
- Pros: Free; solid examples of how to do things
- Cons: You are not Google; embrace with caution
- Quip: Google SRE is proof setting a pile of money on fire is a viable solution to engineering problems.
- URL: https://landing.google.com/sre/
- Opinionated HOWTO implementation guide to monitoring at scale
- Incredibly thorough book
- Pros: Explicit; Detailed
- Cons: Opinionated; Long; Perhaps too specific
- Quip: If a book's art worthiness is measured by weight then we have a winner (767 pages).
- URL: https://www.artofmonitoring.com/
- Culture centric focus on DevOps
- Discusses collaboration, hiring, team building, etc.
- Great for leaders and managers
- Touches on a wide variety of important topics
- Pros: Culture is hard; this helps
- Cons: Etsy probably isn't the best example anymore
- Quip: Effectiveness is a good thing!
- URL: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920039846.do
- Roadmap for building a successful DevOps org
- Addresses hiring, culture, and learning
- Pros: Suggests tuning in your current organization
- Cons: Missing some pieces to the puzzle
- Quip: Yes! Enterprise and DevOps can work together... Somehow.
- URL: http://www.oreilly.com/webops-perf/free/enterprise-devops-playbook.csp
- Community-produced companion to Jim Whitehurst's 2015 book, The Open Organization
- Like SRE book, a collection of essays
- Focus on principles and practices of culture
- Pros: Easy to read; diverse authors; inspirational
- Cons: Not all pieces apply to everyone
- Quip: "Being positive is sometimes difficult to do." I wrote that? Wow. I had no idea.
- URL: https://opensource.com/open-organization/17/6/open-org-it-culture-now-available
- Big picture, business minded change agent
- All phase guide to planning, organizing, implementation, and measurement
- Great for leaders and managers
- Pros: Mindset changing readiness guide
- Cons: None given the scope
- Quip: This is not a weight loss book... Or is it?
- URL: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920030355.do
- Failure happens; Beyond Blame is a HOWTO in making postmortems blameless
- Great for individual contributors, leaders, managers
- Pros: Guides you towards blamelessness
- Cons: Emotions are hard, this isn't a psychiatrist
- Quip: I blame this book for your blame problems.
- URL: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920033981.do
- "Post-accident attribution accident to a 'root cause' is fundamentally wrong"
- Re-thinking failure in our systems makes them more robust
- Pros: Makes case that RCA isn't a solid process
- Cons: None given the scope
- Quip: You're human so you're the problem.
- URL: https://cdn.chrisshort.net/How-Complex-Systems-Fail.pdf
- Foundation shaking look at future
- Great for individual contributors, leaders, managers
- Pros: Helps manage a world we don't know
- Cons: Slightly terrifying
- Quip: Death, taxes, and PagerDuty are the only certainties in life.
- URL: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920038542.do
- Stress isn't all bad if we learn how to manage it
- Stress can actually make us happier
- Pros: Teaches life improving skills
- Cons: None given the scope
- TED Talk: How to make stress your friend
- Quip: If stress is good for me I'm going to live forever.
- URL: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/1583335617/
- Slightly controversial take on disaster in modern times
- Recommended to me by John Willis
- Pros: Makes you rethink your feelings
- Cons: Slightly controversial
- URL: https://www.routledge.com/The-End-of-Heaven-Disaster-and-Suffering-in-a-Scientific-Age/Dekker/p/book/9780415789875
- In DevOps you SHOULD NOT have adversaries
- I am willing to bet that anyone worth their salt has read this though
- Tactics from this work should be used sensibly
- "Know thy enemy"
- Pros: Well known work studied in business, military
- Cons: Not an easy read; multiple differing translations
- URL: http://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html
"You are either building a learning organization or you will be losing to someone who is." --Andrew Clay Shafer