10 Must-Read DevOps Books

From DIY projects to agile transformation, there is no shortage of how-to books spilling with helpful tips of how to cultivate a particular craft. While the DevOps movement began in 2009, there are still a lot of questions about what DevOps means, how it’s done, and what the tangible benefits of DevOps are. As DevOps practices look different in every company, there are no one-size-fits-all frameworks. Thoroughly covering DevOps and its implications requires reading numerous books on the subject. Below we will list the top 10 DevOps must-read books of 2018.

10 must-read DevOps books

The DevOps Handbook

1. The DevOps Handbook

This handbook isn't so much a step-by-step handbook on creating a DevOps culture (continuous integration, continuous deployment and a test-driven environment) but an insightful guide as to how modern IT operations are run and operate. Learn how to create world-class agility, reliability, and security in technology organizations with this workbook.

Authors: Gene Kim, Jez Humble, and Patrick Debois

2. The DevOps Adoption Playbook: A Guide to Adopting DevOps in a Multi-Speed IT Enterprise

Awarded DevOps 2017 Book of the Year, The DevOps Adoption Playbook provides practical, actionable, real-world guidance on implementing DevOps at enterprise scale. This playbook provides unique guidance and insight on implementing DevOps at large organizations. Most DevOps literature is aimed at startups, but enterprises have unique needs, capabilities, limitations, and challenges, which Author Sanjeev Sharma displays with unique connections between modern, efficient, high-quality software delivery and the world of sports.

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

In a fast-paced entertaining style, three DevOps thought-leaders deliver an inspirational story that anyone who works in IT will recognize. Readers will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they'll never view IT the same way again.

The story: 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. With the help of a prospective board member and his mysterious philosophy of The Three Ways, Bill starts to see that IT work has more in common with a manufacturing plant work than he ever imagined. With the clock ticking, Bill must organize work flows to streamline interdepartmental communications, and effectively serve the other business functions at Parts Unlimited.

Authors: Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford

4. Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale

This practical guide presents Lean and Agile principles and patterns to help you move fast at scale—and demonstrates why and how to apply these methodologies throughout your entire organization.

Through case studies, this book explains how successful enterprises have rethought everything from governance and financial management to systems architecture and organizational culture in the pursuit of radically improved performance. Adopting Lean will take time and commitment, but it’s vital for harnessing the cultural and technical forces that are accelerating the rate of innovation.

Authors: Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, Barry O'Reilly

5. Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale

Leading the Transformation is an executive guide, providing a clear framework for improving development and delivery. Instead of the traditional Agile and DevOps approaches that focus on improving the effectiveness of teams, this book targets the coordination of work across teams in large organizations—an improvement that executives are uniquely positioned to lead.

Authors: Gary Gruver, Tommy Mouser

6. Starting and Scaling DevOps in the Enterprise

Starting and Scaling DevOps in the enterprise is a quick, easy-to-read guide that helps structure those improvements by providing a framework that large organizations can use to understand DevOps principles in the context of their current development processes and gain alignment across the organization for successful implementations. The book illustrates how to analyze your current development and delivery processes to ensure you gain positive momentum by implementing the DevOps practices that will have the greatest immediate impact on the productivity of your organization, with the goal of achieving continuous improvement over time.

Author: Gary Gruver

7. DevOps for the Modern Enterprise: Winning Practices to Transform Legacy IT Organizations

Mirco Hering, a thought leader in managing IT within legacy organizations, lays out a roadmap to success for IT managers, showing them how to create the right ecosystem, how to empower people to bring their best to work every day, and how to put the right technology in the driver's seat to propel their organization to success.

But just having the right methods and tools will not magically transform an organization; the cultural change that is the hardest is also the most impactful. Using principles from Agile, Lean, and DevOps as well as first-hand examples from the enterprise world, Hering addresses the different challenges that legacy organizations face as they transform into modern IT departments.

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

Through four years of groundbreaking research to include data collected from the State of DevOps reports conducted with Puppet, 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.

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

This book envelops the whole microservices development and deployment lifecycle using some of the latest and greatest practices and tools. Learn about Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Ubuntu, Docker Swarm and Docker Compose, Consul, etcd, Registrator, confd, and many more. We'll go through many practices and even more tools. Finally, while there will be a lot of theory, this is a hands-on book. You won't be able to complete it by reading it in a metro on a way to work. You'll have to read this book while in front of the computer and get your hands dirty.

10. DevOps Handbook: A Guide to Implementing DevOps in Your Workplace

This book details designing with Conway's law, their Majesties, the tree ways, integrating security. This book explains the principles and values of DevOps and how the modern change can be your company's biggest asset. Made up of easy language, this short handbook is jam-packed with useful, interesting, and practical information.

Author: WorldTech

10 Must-Read DevOps Books