The Phoenix Project

DevOps is just as much about culture and Lean flow as it is about technical automation. Culture can be hard to grasp in textbook form. That’s why the first book about DevOps that we would recommend is a novel about a project and a company in deep problems. We get to follow a VP of Operations on the journey from production disasters to gaining more control of the situation. The word DevOps is hardly mention in the book, instead we get to see how it can be like to just do the needed changes and feel the results. The book is great to get the perspective of IT operations people and how management influence the output of the organisation with their policies. The 5th edition also includes a brief version of the DevOps handbook so this is definitely the book to start with if you are curious about DevOps.

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The Unicorn Project

One perspective that is just briefly mentioned in The Phoenix Project is the situation for the development team. The Unicorn Project is also a novel and revisits the same company. The hero in this tale is a developer that struggles within the stale organisation to reform systems and get DevOps to work. A good book for all team members to read and reflect upon.

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The DevOps Handbook

The name is very apt, this is really a handbook in DevOps. The concepts that you get exposed to between the lines in The Phoenix and Unicorn Project is explained in more theoretical depth here. You will learn all the underlying principles why we behave as we do in a DevOps environment. It’s probably the only book you need if you want to build an organization that leverage DevOps. However, because it includes almost everything, it’s quite dense. Which is why The Phoenix and Unicorn Project books are so needed to explain the whole story, especially around the importance of culture in DevOps.

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Continuous Delivery

If you want to go even deeper inte to how to do CI/CD and all the technical parts of DevOps this is a classic book that sort of predates the word DevOps. Filled with technical hands on tips on how to actually do continuous delivery. You get to read about everything from branching strategies to to cloud computing, dependency management and test data, and of course how to setup your automated pipeline that run on every commit.

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Site Reliability Engineering

As with many things, Google has done it for 10 years but didn’t tell anyone about it. This book describes how applications get transfered from an application team to operations only if it meets high standards of what we would call DevOps maturity, such as CI/CD, automated testing and so on. Only then will the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) take over the pager at night. SRE is a very good piece of the puzzle to the DevOps community consensus on how to do things. It’s free to download from Google.

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Accelerate

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

Not to be confused with any other book called accelerate. This book builds the case for DevOps based on surveys performed for many years with a lot of companies. It becomes clear in the data that companies that employs DevOps techniques and also builds the culture needed for DevOps to work outperform their competition by order of magnitude. Interesting read if you want some tangible proof that DevOps is the way to go.

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