7 Must-Read DevOps?Books
In this article, I will share seven books about DevOps that can be considered a must-read not only by DevOps Engineers, DevOps Architects, DevOps Practitioner, or any other “DevOps career-title-here” — but by anyone involved on the whole lifecycle of software development.
The experience offered by those books is very distinct, and the list includes two novels about IT that make every tech professional recognize the behavior of some characters on their co-workers.
Furthermore, a couple of books also are not even related to IT but focused on process improvement and people management. After all, remember that DevOps is not only about tooling, but also involves process and people.
Disclaimer: The links provided by each book are pointing to the official website of each publisher, and they are not affiliated. All book images, however, are from Amazon.
The Goal
The Goal is a novel about the theory of constraints. The protagonist Alex Rogo, a plant manager of the manufacturing units of UniCo, has the challenging mission of recovering the plant, which has been continuously running in losses. If he fails, the plant will close in 3 months.
In parallel, Alex’s personal life is portrayed with the challenges of his family adapting to life in a small city and the relationship strain caused by long hours at work.
Alex has the help of an old teacher, Jonah, who acts as his mentor. Jonah pushes Alex to go outside his conventional thinking, leading him to figure out the goal of the plant and the truth about productivity.
The concepts of Throughput, Inventory, and Operation Expenses are presented and discussed on how those parameters impact and connects to the goal of the company.
The book goes deep on the Theory of Constraints and the five-step framework to continuously improve the process:
- Identify the system’s constraint
- Decide how to exploit the system’s constraint
- Subordinate everything else to the decisions of Step 2
- Elevate the system’s constraint
- If a constraint is broken in Step 4, go back to Step 1
Johan pointed out that every hour saved on bottleneck can increase the throughput of the entire plant. Taking plant closure to its goal.
- Title: The Goal — A Process of Ongoing Improvement
- Authors: Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Jeff Cox
- Publisher: North River Press
Toyota Kata
This book also goes into the principles of managing and solving constraints in the process, but differently from The Goal, it is not a novel, but a real-world scenario.
Toyota Kata is a set of management techniques for improvement and coaching applied by Toyota on the production system.
The improvement kata routine is based on the following five-question model:
- What is the target condition?
- What is the actual condition now?
- What obstacles are now preventing from reaching the target condition? Which ones are being addressed now?
- What is the next step?
- When can we go and see what we have learned from taking that step?
A key outcome from this book is the importance of defining and following a process. There is a reason the process exists, and skipping a step can have a considerable impact. Sometimes the effect is not immediate but felt in the long term.
It doesn’t mean, however, that the process cannot change, quite the opposite. The process must be open for change, and any chance of improvement must be taken.
But, again, the effort of the change must occur on the bottleneck of the process. Any improvement made before or after the bottleneck will not make a difference on the whole.
- Title: Toyota Kata — Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results
- Author: Mike Rother
- Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
The DevOps Handbook
I must say that this is my favorite from the list and the first one that comes to my mind when someone asks for a recommendation.
This book presents the three ways of DevOps, Flow, Feedback, and Continuous Improvement.
The book also goes through guidance on where to start applying the principles and how to start the DevOps transformation within the organization.
I got inspired to write the following articles on those subjects:
Although it is not a technical book, it describes and raises professional practices that are fundamental to consider during the transformation.
It is also filled with real-cases scenarios and experiences from companies such as Etsy, Nordstrom, Google, Facebook, Alcoa, and Target.
- Title: The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
- Authors: Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, John Willis, Jez Humble, John Allspaw
- Publisher: IT Revolution Press
The Phoenix Project
While The Goal is a novel about the theory of constraints and describes the challenges of a plant manager on fixing the manufacturing stream, The Phoenix Project goes in the same direction, but on the IT environment.
Gene Kim gave life to Bill Palmer and his journey to understand and implement the three ways of DevOps to recover the IT department of Parts Unlimited and avoid its completely outsourcing.
As Alex had Jonah as a mentor at UniCo, Bill has Erick playing the same role, leading him to uncover and map the four kinds of work that is preventing the department from delivering fast and with quality, without breaking everything.
The four kinds of work (sorry for the spoiler!) are:
- Business Projects
- Internal IT Projects
- Changes
- Unplanned work
Only after uncovering those types, Bill can understand where the effort of his team is being spent, pointing where on the value stream must be improved.
- Title: The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
- Authors: Gene Kim, Kevin Gehr, George Spafford
- Publisher: IT Revolution Press
The Unicorn Project
Not exactly a sequel to The Phoenix Project story, as I imagined before, but a different point of view.
This time the narrative happens through the eyes of Maxine, a God-level developer and architect that is amazing at almost everything.
Unfortunately, she was punished by an issue in production and “promoted” to The Phoenix Project team, which is very known for its fame of not doing well.
Maxine also has the mentorship of Erick, that this time guides her on the discovery of the five ideals of problem-solving:
- Locality and Simplicity
- Focus, Flow, and Joy
- Improvement of Daily Work
- Psychological Safety
- Customer Focus
The Unicorn Project doesn’t require that you read The Phoenix Project before but is highly recommended.
- Title: The Unicorn Project
- Author: Gene Kim
- Publisher: IT Revolution Press
Accelerate
Accelerate is a result of intense research on the capabilities that drive improvements in software delivery performance.
The book uncovers 24 key capabilities divided into five categories:
- Continuous Delivery
- Architecture
- Products and Process
- Lean Management and Monitoring
- Cultural
In addition to the key capabilities, the following four metrics are the ones that were considered the key to analyzing the software delivery performance:
- Lead Time
- Deployment Frequency
- MTTR — Mean Time To Restore
- Change Fail Percentage
Dr. Nicole Forsgren explains the methodology and framework used to analyze the data and reach the outcomes of the book.
Measuring performance in the domain of software is hard — in part because, unlike manufacturing, the inventory is invisible
- Title: Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations
- Authors: Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim
- Publisher: IT Revolution Press
Effective DevOps
With a foreword by John Allspaw and Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Effective DevOps is one of the complete DevOps books in terms of embracing the concepts of DevOps.
The book goes beyond the examples and metaphors with an assembly line, and the authors don’t just present about teamwork, tooling, process, and collaboration, but touch a crucial point that is fundamental on a transformation: Scaling and Growth.
Long gone are the days that manufacturing and assembly-line metaphors could be used in software development and operations. Long gone are the days that products are things that are designed, planned, and then finally launched. There is no “finally” anymore. There is only an endless cycle of adaptation, change, and learning. — John Allspaw
As mentioned by the authors, the book is organized in six parts, and you don’t need to follow a specific order to read them:
- Part I — What is DevOps?
- Part II — Collaboration
- Part III — Affinity
- Part IV — Tools
- Part V — Scaling
- Part VI — Bridging DevOps Cultures
But do yourself a favor: Read them all!
- Title: Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale
- Authors: Jennifer Davis, Ryn Daniels
- Publisher: O’Reilly Media
By the way, this book has a free e-book format listed as a white paper on Microsoft Azure:
Bonus
Beyond The Phoenix Project
It is an original nine-part audio series where the author of The Phoenix Project, Gene Kim, and John Willis, Director of Ecosystem Development at Docker, discuss the history of DevOps movement.
Gene Kim also describes the creative process behind The Phoenix Project ant the inspiration connections with The Goal, also mentioned in this article.
Ideally, go for the audiobook version!
DORA — State of DevOps Report
Not exactly a book, but a Report created by DORA — DevOps Research & Assessment — where annually they collect data from the industry and create the State of DevOps Report.
The research is led by Dr. Nicole Forsgren, CEO and Chief Scientist of DORA, and also the author of one of the books mentioned in this article, Accelerate.
Note that Google recently acquired DORA.
The State of DevOps Report is a good source of information that can help companies to identify themselves and what the key metrics are. With this information in hand, companies have the opportunity to check which areas they need to improve, comparing to the industry.
I hope you got inspired by this selection of essential books on DevOps, whether you are a beginning or an expert on this subject.
As always, feel free to share, like, comment, agree or disagree. Any feedback is welcome.