DevOps Reading List: Top 30 Best DevOps Books You Should Read

As we discussed, DevOps has become a business buzzword in recent years. However, it is still something new. There are many excellent resources on DevOps that can help to clear some of the doubts you may have about the movement and its ideals. I spoke with our team of software architects, software developers and DevOps experts and we came up with the DevOps reading list. We believe that these books should be read by people, who are interested in doing the DevOps right.

In this DevOps reading list you will find books which will help you find answers to your questions. However, authors can’t cover everything just in one book, therefore each one is dedicated to special areas of DevOps to better understand it. Also, you will find examples and case studies on how to implement DevOps in your organization and what are the best practices that should be definitely used to be a truly agile team.

DevOps reading list: top 30 best DevOps books you should read this year

1.Architecting for Scale: High Availability for Your Growing Applications by Lee Atchison

The first one on our DevOps reading list is Architecting for Scale. It is an excellent book to understand real-world paradigms for scaling and managing critical applications. This book covers 5 different elements: availability, risk management, services and microservices, scaling applications and cloud services. This book can be called a practical guide as well, it shows how to prevent an application from becoming slow, inconsistent, or downright unavailable as it grows. Also, in this book the word “Scaling” is explained very well as it is not just about handling more users; it’s also about managing risk and ensuring availability.

2. The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations by Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, John Willis, Jez Humble, John Allspaw

The second one on our DevOps reading list is The DevOps Handbook. This is probably one of the most known and most influencing books in the field of DevOps. As we all know, the effective management of technology is critical for business competitiveness. Many teams and companies still struggle to balance agility, reliability, and security. DevOps Handbook is a very good guide with well-researched work, case studies and examples.

3. AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide: Associate Exam by Joe Baron, Hisham Baz, Tim Bixler, Biff Gaut, Kevin E. Kelly, Sean Senior and John Stamper

The third one on our DevOps reading list is AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide. This is another excellent practical DevOps guide that covers objectives, including designing highly available, cost-efficient, fault tolerant, scalable systems, implementation and deployment, data security, troubleshooting and many more. If you want to learn Cloud Computing and enrich your knowledge about creating your cloud-based infrastructure and services on the top of AWS, this book is definitely for you. This book provides key review on topics, including mapping multi-tier architectures to AWS Services, understanding managed RDBMS through AWS RDS, understanding loose coupling, and stateless systems, consistency models in AWS Services, route tables, access control lists, firewalls, NAT, and DNS, large-scale distributed systems, elasticity and scalability concepts, network technologies relating to AWS, etc.

4. Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems by Sam Newman

The fourth one on our DevOps reading list is Building Microservices. This book is well written and easy to follow. Here you will find topics like team building, versioning, logging, monitoring, microservices, etc. With lots of examples and practical advice, this book takes a holistic view of the topics that system architects and administrators must consider when building, managing, and evolving microservice architectures.

5. DevOps for Web Development by Mitesh Soni

And the fifth one on our DevOps reading list is DevOps for Web Development. This book combines the skills of both web application deployment and system configuration with an easy explanation for an end to end automation and a good amount of screenshots. Here the authors talk about key tools when it comes to DevOps such as Jenkins, Chef, AWS, Azure, Docker, New Relic, Nagios. Also, he covers ways on how to do deployment and monitoring.
With this book, you will definitely learn how to deploy web applications for a variety of Cloud platforms such as Amazon EC2, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Microsoft Azure, Azure Web Apps, and Docker Container. You will find out how to use Jenkins for a Continuous Integration Chef configuration management tool, Docker containers, continuous delivery and continuous deployment in AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Docker, using Jenkins 2.0.We really like this book because each chapter is like a practical hands-on project.

6. AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide: Associate Exam by Joe Baron, Hisham Baz, Tim Bixler, Biff Gaut, Kevin E. Kelly, Sean Senior, John Stamper

This book is a collection of case studies about cloud automation, infrastructure and DevOps.
It is very well written and quite comprehensive. You will learn how to do DevOps from leading companies in the world: Netflix, Amazon, Etsy, etc.

7. Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale by Jennifer Davis, Ryn Daniels

This book should be definitely on the DevOps reading list. As effective DevOps is not just a technical guide but it is also a cultural and managerial guide. DevOps is about team collaboration and cultural challenges and this book focus more on these human sides. This book connects the technical and cultural aspects of DevOps, describing failures and successes.Also, it provides different approaches for improving collaboration within teams, creating bonds among teams, choosing the right tools and workflows, and scaling up effective practices.

8. Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, Niall Richard Murphy

How Google Runs Production Systems ? This is the main question of this book. What we like about this book is that each chapter is independent and covers a specific subject. This book is a collection of essays and articles, where key members of Google’s Site Reliability Team explain how and why their commitment to the entire lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world. You will also find principles and practices that enable Google engineers to make systems more scalable, reliable, and efficient.

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

This book explains how to build a full and stable CI/CD pipeline and support modern and distributed applications build on top of microservices architectures. It covers modern technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Ubuntu, Docker Swarm and Docker Compose, Consul, etcd, Registrator, confd, etc. This book describes technical fundamentals of DevOps with concrete examples and explained use cases. In a nutshell, this book covers techniques that help us build software in a better and more efficient way with microservices packed as immutable containers, tested and deployed continuously to servers that are automatically provisioned with configuration management tools. It is about fast, reliable and continuous deployments with zero-downtime and ability to roll-back. It is about scaling to any number of servers, design of self-healing systems capable of recuperation from both hardware and software failures and about centralized logging and monitoring of the cluster. This book shows the whole process of microservices development and deployment lifecycle using some of the latest and greatest practices and tools.

10. DevOps: A Software Architect’s Perspective by Len Bass, Ingo Weber, Liming Zhu

This book is absolutely a must and should be included in DevOps reading list to buils sclabale platforms. For software architects, this book is a very good reference to understand and master DevOps environments. It was written by 3 software architects and it covers a lot of interesting subjects like DevOps requirements, virtualization and cloud computing, operations, adapting systems to work well with DevOps practices, agile methods, and TDD. With this book you will learn how to do failure detection, upgrade planning, integrating security controls, roles, and audits into DevOps, preparing a business plan for DevOps adoption, rollout, and measurement and adapting software to a DevOps pipeline and workflows. The authors review decisions software architects must make in order to achieve DevOps’ goals and clarify how other DevOps participants are likely to impact the architect’s work. They also provide the organizational, technical, and operational context needed to deploy DevOps more efficiently, and review DevOps’ impact on each development phase. The authors address cross-cutting concerns that link multiple functions, offering practical insights into compliance, performance, reliability, repeatability, and security.

11. Practical DevOps by Joakim Verona

What we like about this book is that it covers the practical part of architecture, coding, testing, deploying, monitoring and tracking issues. Also, author talks about the Internet of Things in DevOps environments. This book helps readers familiarize themselves with the tools needed for DevOps efficiency, and teaches them how to design an application suitable for continuous deployment systems using DevOps practices. It also teaches readers to store and manage code effectively using different options such as Git, Gerrit, and Gitlab, and then test, deploy, and monitor the code.

12. AWS Lambda in Action: Event-driven serverless applications by Danilo Poccia

AWS Lambda is one of the most popular and stable serverless architectures. This book makes a perfect reference guide for it. The book is easy to read book for somebody new to the subject. This book make also reference to other AWS services that could be used with Lambda like the API Gateway, Cognito, S3, DynamoDB, CloudFormation, IAM and SNS.

13. Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation by Jez Humble, David Farley

This book is a guide to releasing software faster while reducing risk and increasing quality. It enumerates the best practices and fast, simple techniques for release and production deployment management. It also covers other practices like production monitoring and tracing, dependency management, effective use of virtualization, automated infrastructure management, data migration. It shows how to do automating creating, integrating, testing, and deploying software.

14. Production-Ready Microservices: Building Standardized Systems Across an Engineering Organization

This book covers the architectural, operational, and organizational standardization to develop and deploy production-ready microservices. It explores production-readiness standards, including stability and reliability, scalability and performance, fault tolerance and catastrophe preparedness, monitoring, documentation, and understanding. You will learn how to design microservices that are stable, reliable, scalable, fault tolerant, performant, monitored, documented, and prepared for any catastrophe.

15. Painless Docker Basic Edition: A Practical Guide to Master Docker and its Ecosystem Based on Real World Examples by Aymen El Amri

Painless Docker is a practical guide to master Docker and its ecosystem based on real-world examples. It tends to be a complete and detailed guide to create, deploy, optimize, secure, trace, debug, log, orchestrate & monitor Docker and Docker clusters.

16. DevOps for Developers by Michael Hüttermann

This book is for software developers and engineers that aim to help improve the delivery of software by using lean practices to get apps and software into production. The value in this book is its real-life examples, and explanations as to how different roles on teams can work together more collaboratively.

17. Implementing Modern DevOps: Enabling IT Organizations to Deliver Faster and Smarter by David Gonzalez

This book starts by explaining the organizational alignment that has to happen in every company that wants to implement DevOps in order to be effective, and the use of cloud data centers in combination with the most advanced DevOps tools to get the best out of a small team of skilled engineers. It also dives into how to use Kubernetes to run your applications on Google Cloud Platform, minimizing the friction and hassle of maintaining a cluster but ensuring its high availability.

18. Hands-on DevOps: Explore the Concept of Continuous Delivery and Integrate It with Data Science Concepts by Sricharan Vadapalli

This book is about transforming yourself into a specialist in DevOps. DevOps strategies have really become an important factor for big data environments. This book initially provides an introduction to big data, DevOps, CI/CD and containerization and cloud computing along with the need for DevOps strategies in big data environments.

19. Continuous Delivery for Java Apps by Jorge Acetozi

This book is about building a CD Pipeline step by step using Kubernetes, Docker, Vagrant, Jenkins, Spring, Maven, and Artifactory.In other words, it is a guide to the implementation of the real-world continuous delivery using new technologies that are in high demand by the best companies around the world. I should mention that this book is intended for Java Developers or SysAdmins with experience in Java.

20. DevOps with Kubernetes: Accelerating software delivery with container orchestrators by Hideto Saito, Hui-Chuan Chloe Lee, Cheng-Yang Wu

In this book, the authors explain how to implement DevOps using Docker and Kubernetes.
Google developed Kubernetes, which orchestrates containers efficiently and is considered the frontrunner in container orchestration. Kubernetes is an orchestrator that creates and manages your containers on clusters of servers. This book will help you leverage Kubernetes as a platform to deploy, scale, and run containers efficiently. It will also guide you from simply deploying a container to administrate a Kubernetes cluster, and then you will learn how to do monitoring, logging, and continuous deployment in DevOps. After reading this book you will know fundamental and advanced DevOps skills and tools, have a comprehensive understanding about containers, you will be able to move your application to a container, manipulate your application via Kubernetes, etc.

21. GDPR for DevOps: The Law, Controls, and Solutions by Alasdair Gilchrist

This book aims to educate, develop and guide DevOps as well as security practitioners how to plan, develop and manage product development so that their products will meet Privacy compliance. It will cover data governance, encryption, and application development controls, but the main focus is on GDPR – the general data protection regulation.

22. Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim

This book presents both the findings and the science behind the State of DevOps report conducted with Puppet. Readers will discover how to measure the performance of their teams, and what capabilities they should invest in to drive higher performance. This book is ideal for management at every level.

23. The Docker Book: Containerization is the new virtualization by James Turnbull

Very good book for all those who are interested in deploying the open source container service Docker. In this book, you will find info about installing, deploying, managing and extending Docker. You are going to look at the development lifecycle, from testing to production, and see where Docker fits in and how it can make your life easier. You will see how Docker is used to building test environments for new projects, how to integrate Docker with continuous integration workflow, and then how to build application services and platforms.

24. Starting and Scaling DevOps in the Enterprise by Gary Gruver, Jez Humble

This book is an easy-to-read guide that helps structure 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. DevOps is a fundamental shift in how leading-edge companies are starting to manage their software and IT work. Businesses need to move more quickly than ever before, and large software organizations are applying these DevOps principles to develop new software faster than anyone previously thought possible.

25. The DevOps Adoption Playbook: A Guide to Adopting DevOps in a Multi-Speed IT Enterprise by Sanjeev Sharma

Awarded DevOps 2017 Book of the Year, The DevOps Adoption Playbook provides practical, actionable, real-world guidance on implementing DevOps at enterprise scale. And of course, this book is on our DevOps reading list. Most DevOps books are aimed at startups, but enterprises have unique needs, capabilities, limitations, and challenges. This book shows how to deliver high-value applications and systems with velocity and agility by adopting the necessary practices, automation tools, and organizational and cultural changes that lead to innovation through rapid experimentation. Speed is an advantage in the face of competition, but it must never come at the expense of quality. DevOps allows your organization to keep both by intersecting development, quality assurance, and operations.
Enterprise-level DevOps comes with its own set of challenges, but this book shows you just how easily they are overcome. With few DevOps changes, your organization can stay ahead of the competition while keeping costs, risks, and quality under control.

26. Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale by Gary Gruver, Tommy Mouser, Gene Kim

The software is becoming more and more important, yet most technology executives struggle to deliver software improvements their businesses require. Leading-edge companies like Amazon and Google are applying DevOps and Agile principles to deliver large software projects faster than anyone thought possible. This book targets the coordination of work across teams in large organizations.

27. Next Gen DevOps: Creating the DevOps Organisation By Grant Smith

Next Gen DevOps merges behavior-driven development, infrastructure-as-code, automated testing, monitoring and continuous integration into a single coherent process. The book presents an implementation strategy that allows firms large or small, start-up or enterprise to embrace the move to DevOps.

28. Effective DevOps with AWS: Ship faster, scale better, and deliver incredible productivity by Nathaniel Felsen

The DevOps movement has transformed the way modern tech companies work. In this book, you’ll see how the most successful tech startups launch and scale their services on AWS. Also you will see how to treat infrastructure as code, meaning you can bring resources online and offline as necessary with the code as easily as you control your software. You will also build a continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline to keep your app up to date. You’ll find out how to scale your applications to offer maximum performance to users anywhere in the world, even when traffic spikes with the latest technologies, such as containers and serverless computing. You will also take a deep dive into monitoring and alerting to make sure your users have the best experience when using your service.

29. 5 Unsung Tools of DevOps by Jonathan Thurman

The tools we use, play a critical role in how effective we are. In today’s ever-changing world of technology, we tend to focus on the latest and greatest solutions and overlook the simple tools that are available. Constant improvement of tools is an important aspect of the DevOps movement.

30. Scalability Rules: Principles for Scaling Web Sites by Martin L. Abbott, Michael T. Fisher

And the last but not least on our DevOps reading list is scalability rules. We all know that scalability is extremely important in software development world. In this book, you will find actual experiences and case studies from CTOs and technology executives at Etsy, NASDAQ, Salesforce, Shutterfly, Chegg, Warby Parker, Twitter, and other scalability pioneers.

I hope you found this DevOps reading list interesting and useful. If you know other DevOps books that should be mentioned here, please write them down in the comments section below. Thank you!

Btw, if you are interested in getting info about new books that are added to our DevOps reading list, feel free to subscribe to our monthly newsletter.

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