Best DevOps Books 2024

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

The DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois & John Willis is the best book on devops for anyone looking to transform their IT organization. Written for anyone that wants to make serious changes through the DevOps methodology and become a DevOps Engineer. The need to read for anyone book digs into the three foundational principles underpinning known as The Three Ways: Flow, Feedback, and Continual Learning and Experimentation. This guidebook has More than 40 case studies, including Google, Facebook, Amazon Web Services etc. This is the best DevOps book in 2023.

For years, The DevOps Handbook has been the definitive guide for taking the successes laid out in the bestselling The Phoenix Project and applying them in any organization. Now, with this fully updated and expanded edition, it’s time to take DevOps out of the IT department and apply it across the full business. Technology is now at the core of every company, no matter the business model or product. The theories and practices laid out in The DevOps Handbook are tools to be used by anyone from across the organization to create joy and succeed in the marketplace.

The second edition features 15 new case studies, including stories from Adidas, American Airlines, Fannie Mae, Target, and the US Air Force. In addition, renowned researcher and coauthor of Accelerate, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, provides her insights through new and updated material and research. With over 100 pages of new content throughout the book, this expanded edition is a must read for anyone who works with technology.

This is the Best DevOps book 2023.

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

by Dr Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble and Gene Kim will help you understand how DevOps can affect your organization project management for the better. This book by Nicole Forsgren & Jez Humble is should be on every DevOps reading list. The four ares where your organization must accelerate are:

• Speed to market: Delivery of quality goods and web services that satisfy customers
• Future-oriented outlook: Engagement with the market to detect and understand customer demand
• Regulation & compliance: Anticipation of compliance and regulatory changes that impact their systems
• Security: Response to potential risks, such as security threats or changes in the economy

You will learn how performance management of your team member and how to invest in higher performance. The four metrics you will measure are:

• Lead Time: Time it takes to fulfill an order.
• Deployment Frequency: Small batches mean higher deployment frequencies.
• Mean Time to Restore (MTTR): How you recover from failure.
• Change Fail Percentage: Quality measurement through the process

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

The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford describes the underpinning principles that all the DevOps patterns can be derived from as ‘The Three Ways’. The Phoenix Project is intended to describe the values and philosophies that guide DevOps processes.

The First Way is left-to-right flow of work from Development to IT Operations to the customer. The Second Way is the constant flow of fast feedback from right-to-left at all stages of the value stream. It amplifies it to ensure that we can prevent problems from happening again, enable faster detection and recovery. The Third Way is about creating a culture guidance that fosters two things: continual experimentation and repetition.

In this newly updated and expanded edition of the bestselling The Phoenix Project, co-author Gene Kim includes a new afterword and a deeper delve into the Three Ways as described in The DevOps Handbook. This is one of the best devops books for beginners. It should be read by every DevOps engineer and all aspiring DevOps engineers.

The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

by Gene Kim. This highly anticipated follow-up to the bestselling title The Phoenix Project takes another look at Parts Unlimited, this time from the perspective of software development. The book reveals the Five Ideals: The First Ideal of Locality and Simplicity; The Second Ideal of Focus, Flow, and Joy; The Third Ideal of Improvement of Daily Work; The Fourth Ideal of Psychological Safety; and the Fifth Ideal of Focus on the Customer.

DevOps for the Desperate: A Hands-On Survival Guide

by Bradley Smith is a hands-on, no-nonsense guide for those who land in a DevOps environment and need to get up and running quickly. This book introduces fundamental concepts software developers need to know to flourish in a modern DevOps environment including infrastructure as code, configuration management, security, containerization and orchestration, monitoring and alerting, and troubleshooting. Readers will follow along with hands-on examples to learn how to tackle common DevOps tasks.

The book begins with an exploration of DevOps concepts using Vagrant and Ansible to build systems with repeatable and predictable states, including configuring a host with user-based security regardless of operating system for infrastructure management. Next up is a crash course on containerization, orchestration, and delivery using Docker, Kubernetes, and a CI/CDpipeline. The book concludes with a primer in monitoring and alerting with tips for troubleshootingcommon host and application issues.

You’ll learn how to:

Use Ansible to manage users and groups, and enforce complex passwords
Create a security policy for administrative permissions, and automate a host-based firewall
Get started with Docker to containerize applications, use Kubernetes for orchestration, and deploycode using a CI/CD pipeline
Build a monitoring stack, investigate common metric patterns, and trigger alerts
Troubleshoot and analyze common issues and errors found on hosts

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems

Site Reliability Engineering by Niall Murphy, Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones & Jennifer Petoff. The vast majority of the useful life of a software system is spent in use, not in design or implementation. So why does conventional wisdom insist that software engineers focus primarily on the design and development of large-scale computer systems? In this collection of essays and articles, site reliability engineers of Google’s site trustworthiness team discuss how and why their involvement in the lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, implement, and monitor and maintain some of Google’s site reliability systems. You will learn the principles and DevOps practices that enable Google engineers and DevOps team to make systems more scalable, reliable and efficient – lessons directly applicable to your organization.

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

by Jez Humble and David Farley will teach software teams principles and technical practices that enable fast and incremental delivery and development of software ande application development. By automation of the build, deployments, and testing process. Improved collaboration between software developers, testers, and operations,can get changes released in a matter of hours. It can even happen in minutes, regardless what the size of a project is or the complexity of its code base. You will be learning:

• Automate building, integrating, testing, and deploying
• Implementing deployment pipeline
• Better development process between developers, testers, and operations
• Developing features incrementally on both large and distributed team access
• Effective configuration management DevOps strategy implementation
• Automating acceptance testing, from analysis to implementation
• Managing infrastructure, data, components and dependencies
• Navigating risk management, compliance, and auditing
• Testing capacity and other non-functional requirements
• Implementing continuous deployments and zero-downtime releases

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

by author Sanjeev Sharma teaches DevOps scaling applications. This best book on devops for beginners contains practical, actionable, real-world guidance on implementing DevOps environment as a DevOps professional. You will learn:

• Grasp DevOps impact on IT organizations
• Achieve high-value innovation and optimization with low cost and risk
• Exceed traditional business goals with higher product release efficiency
• DevOps Implemention in large organizations and large-scale enterprise IT environments without any problems

Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale

by Gary Gruver & Tommy Mouser with Forward by Gene Kim. Leading the Transformation is an executive guide that provides a clear framework to improve development and delivery. Rather than traditional Agile and DevOps approaches that focus on improving team effectiveness, this best book for devops focuses on coordinating work between teams in large organizations – an improvement that leaders are in a unique position to lead.

Measure What Matters

John Doerr shares a wide range of behind-the-scenes first-person case studies with storytellers like Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred in so many large organizations. . This book will help a new generation of leaders to capture the same magic.

Effective DevOps

By Jennifer Davis & Ryn Daniels. Some companies think that adopting devops means adding specialists or a multitude of new tools. With this best books for devops beginners, you will learn why devops is a professional and company culture movement that calls for change from within your organization. Authors Ryn Daniels and Jennifer Davis offer several approaches to improve collaboration within teams, create affinities between teams, promote effective use of tools in your business, and scale what works at tipping points in your organization.

The DevOps 2.1 Toolkit

by Viktor Farcic teaches you all aspects of building, testing, deploying, and monitoring services inside Docker Swarm clusters. This DevOps ebook will then take you through all the tools required for running a cluster and monitoring. You will also work with different hosting services like AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean, etc. in the best azure devops books.

DevOps: A Software Architect’s Perspective

by Len Bass, Ingo Weber & Liming Zhu examine the decisions software architects must make to achieve DevOps goals and clarify the impact that other DevOps practitioner are likely to have on the architect’s work. They also provide the organizational, technical, and operational context necessary to implement DevOps more effectively and examine the impact of DevOps at each stage of development.

Building Microservices

by Sam Newman gives everyone from architects and developers to testers and IT operators a firm grounding in the concepts. You’ll dive into the latest solutions for modeling, integrating, testing, deploying, and monitoring your own autonomous services. Real-world cases reveal how organizations today manage to get the most out of these architectures.

Infrastructure as Code

by Kief Morris of ThoughtWorks shows you how to effectively use principles, practices, and patterns pioneered by DevOps teams to manage cloud-age infrastructure. Ideal for system administrators, infrastructure engineers, software developers, team leads, and architects, this best books on devops demonstrates how you can exploit cloud and automation technology to make changes easily, safely, quickly, and responsibly. You’ll learn how to define everything as code and apply software design and engineering practices to build your system from small, loosely coupled pieces.

Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture

by Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick is a step-by-step guide on harnessing the power of human conversation to produce truly Agile outcomes. Stop doing pointless rituals that don’t produce outcomes. Instead, use conversation’s inherent human capacity to create effective, high-performing teams.

Python for Devops: Learn Ruthlessly Effective Automation

by Noah Gift, Kennedy Behrman, Alfredo Deza, Grig Gheorghiu shows you how to utilize Python with today’s most useful DevOps tools, such as Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform, to do routine Linux system administration duties.

For millions of professionals, knowing how to communicate with and automate with Linux is a must-have ability. Python makes it a lot simpler. This book will teach you how to use containers to develop software and solve problems, as well as how to monitor, instrument, load-test, and operationalize your software. This is your guide to finding efficient ways to “get stuff done” in Python.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is DevOps?

DevOps (Development and Operations) is a software development and delivery process. DevOps focuses on communication and collaboration between product management, software delivery, and operations professionals. DevOps culture has been implemented by Netflix, Google, etc. DevOps job opportunities are an in-demand professions with high salaries.

How can I learn DevOps?

DevOps has a very broad body of knowledge, and there are many ways to learn it. You can start by reading about it, taking training courses, participating in forums and chat rooms, attending conferences, and more. It is also important to educate yourself about DevOps principles, practices, and popular tools

What are the benefits of DevOps?

DevOps aims to synergize the efforts of the development and operations teams to accelerate the delivery of software products, with a minimal failure rate. It is a value-added practice, where development and operations engineers join hands throughout the product or service lifecycle, right from the design stage to the point of deployment

What are the key principles of DevOps?

The key principles of DevOps include automation, collaboration, communication, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and a culture of shared responsibility.

What are the core practices of DevOps?

Core practices of DevOps include version control, continuous integration, continuous delivery, automated testing, infrastructure as code, and monitoring and feedback.