Books & articles for DevOps to read
Books
The Phoenix Project
by Gene Kim (Author), Kevin Behr (Author), George Spafford (Author)
Bill is an IT manager at Parts Unlimited. It's Tuesday morning and on his drive into the office, Bill gets a call from the CEO. The company's new IT initiative, code named Phoenix Project, is critical to the future of Parts Unlimited, but the project is massively over budget and very late. The CEO wants Bill to report directly to him and fix the mess in ninety days or else …
Visible Ops
by Kevin Behr (Author), Gene Kim (Author), George Spafford (Author)
The Core of Visible Ops Visible Ops is a methodology designed to jumpstart implementation of controls and process improvement in IT organizations needing to increase service levels, security, and auditability while managing costs. Visible Ops is comprised of four prescriptive and self-fueling steps that take an organization from any starting point to a continually improving process. …
Lean Enterprise
By Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, Barry O'Reilly
The first and most comprehensive book on bringing the startup mindset into large organizations. Forget vague notions of creating an "innovative culture." This book reveals the methodologies, tools, and incentive structures guiding the world's largest organizations to reclaim their innovation prowess. …
Continuous Delivery
by Jez Humble and David Farley
Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This groundbreaking new book sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers, and operations, …
UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook
by Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Trent R. Hein and Ben Whaley
This book approaches system administration in a practical way and is an invaluable reference for both new administrators and experienced professionals. It details best practices for every facet of system administration, including storage management, network design and administration, email, web hosting, scripting, software configuration management, performance analysis, Windows interoperability, virtualization, DNS, security, management of IT service organizations, and much more.
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Jeff Cox, David Whitford
This book is one of the inspirations of "The Phoenix Project" One of Eli Goldratt’s convictions was that the goal of an individual or an organization should not be defined in absolute terms. A good definition of a goal is one that sets us on a path of ongoing improvement. Pursuing such a goal necessitates more than one breakthrough. In fact it requires many. To be in a position to identify these breakthroughs we should have a deep understanding of the underlying rules of our environment.
Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future
by Blake Masters and Peter Thiel
The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them. It’s easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. Every new creation goes from 0 to 1. This book is about how to get there.
The Practice of Cloud System Administration
by Thomas A. Limoncelli
- http://the-cloud-book.com/
- http://www.amazon.com/Practice-Cloud-System-Administration-Distributed/dp/032194318X/
The Practice of Cloud System Administration, focuses on “distributed” or “cloud” computing and brings a DevOps/SRE sensibility to the practice of system administration. Unsatisfied with books that cover either design or operations in isolation, the authors created this authoritative reference centered around a comprehensive approach. Case studies and examples from Google, Twitter, Facebook, Etsy, Netflix, Amazon and other industry giants are explained in practical ways that are useful to all enterprises.
Time Management for System Administrators
by Thomas A. Limoncelli
Time is a precious commodity, especially if you're a system administrator. No other job pulls people in so many directions at once. Users interrupt you constantly with requests, preventing you from getting anything done. Your managers want you to get long-term projects done but flood you with requests for quick-fixes that prevent you from ever getting to those long-term projects. But the pressure is on you to produce and it only increases with time. What do you do?
The answer is time management. And not just any time management theory--you want Time Management for System Administrators, to be exact. With keen insights into the challenges you face as a sys admin, bestselling author Thomas Limoncelli has put together a collection of tips and techniques that will help you cultivate the time management skills you need to flourish as a system administrator.
Time Management for System Administrators understands that an Sys Admin often has competing goals: the concurrent responsibilities of working on large projects and taking care of a user's needs. That's why it focuses on strategies that help you work through daily tasks, yet still allow you to handle critical situations that inevitably arise.
Among other skills, you'll learn how to:
- Manage interruptions
- Eliminate timewasters
- Keep an effective calendar
- Develop routines for things that occur regularly
- Use your brain only for what you're currently working on
- Prioritize based on customer expectations
- Document and automate processes for faster execution
What's more, the book doesn't confine itself to just the work environment, either. It also offers tips on how to apply these time management tools to your social life. It's the first step to a more productive, happier you.
Articles and misc stuff
Awesome Sysadmin
by @kahun
A curated list of amazingly awesome open source sysadmin resources inspired by Awesome PHP
97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
Sysadvent
One article for each day of December, ending on the 25th article.
With the goals of of sharing, openness, and mentoring, we aim to provide great articles about systems administration topics written by fellow sysadmins.