DevOps Definitions

The main reason behind DevOps' popularity is that it allows enterprises to create and improve products at a faster pace than traditional software development methods according to dzone.com.

According to Wikipedia, DevOps is a set of software development practices that combine software development and information-technology operations to shorten the systems-development life cycle while delivering features, fixes, and updates frequently in close alignment with business objectives.

According to Atlassian, DevOps is a set of practices that automates the processes between software development and IT teams, in order that they can build, test, and release software faster and more reliably. The concept of DevOps is founded on building a culture of collaboration between teams that historically functioned in relative siloes. The promised benefits include increased trust, faster software releases, ability to solve critical issues quickly, and better manage unplanned work.

5 Books Good to Read about DevOps

As George R.R. Martin said, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.”

Here is a list of 5 books you can read to better understand DevOps:

1. The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win https://www.amazon.co.uk/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business-ebook/dp/B00AZRBLHO

As Parts Unlimited IT manager Bill is driving to his office on a Tuesday morning, he gets a call from the CEO. The call is about the Phoenix Project. It is Parts Unlimited’s new IT initiative and it's critical to the future of the company. However, the project is way over budget and very late. The CEO is 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 requires Bill to directly report to him. He needs Bill to fix the mess in ninety days or less. If he fails, the entire department will be outsourced. Bill gains a new perspective on IT work and how it is very common to a manufacturing plant. A prospective board member teaches Bill about the philosophy of The Three Ways. In an entertaining fast-paced style, the three luminaries of the DevOps movement deliver the story of The Phoenix Project. Anyone who works in IT can relate to the story and readers will never view IT the same way again.

In this comprehensive look into The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim , you'll gain insight with this essential resource as a guide to aid your discussions.

Be prepared to lead with the following:

Discussion aid which includes a wealth of prompts and information

Overall plot synopsis and author biography

Thought-provoking discussion questions for a deeper examination

Creative exercises to foster alternate “if this was you” discussions

And more!

source: goodreads.com

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

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Devops-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002

Increase profitability, elevate work culture, and exceed productivity goals through DevOps practices.

More than ever, the effective management of technology is critical for business competitiveness. For decades, technology leaders have struggled to balance agility, reliability, and security. The consequences of failure have never been greater whether it's the healthcare.gov debacle, cardholder data breaches, or missing the boat with Big Data in the cloud.

And yet, high performers using DevOps principles, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Etsy, and Netflix, are routinely and reliably deploying code into production hundreds, or even thousands, of times per day.

Following in the footsteps of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook shows leaders how to replicate these incredible outcomes, by showing how to integrate Product Management, Development, QA, IT Operations, and Information Security to elevate your company and win in the marketplace." source: goodreads.com

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

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912

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, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours-- sometimes even minutes-no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base.

Jez Humble and David Farley begin by presenting the foundations of a rapid, reliable, low-risk delivery process. Next, they introduce the "deployment pipeline," an automated process for managing all changes, from check-in to release. Finally, they discuss the "ecosystem" needed to support continuous delivery, from infrastructure, data and configuration management to governance.

The authors introduce state-of-the-art techniques, including automated infrastructure management and data migration, and the use of virtualization.

For each, they review key issues, identify best practices, and demonstrate how to mitigate risks.

Coverage includes:

- Automating all facets of building, integrating, testing, and deploying software

- Implementing deployment pipelines at team and organizational levels

- Improving collaboration between developers, testers, and operations

- Developing features incrementally on large and distributed teams

- Implementing an effective configuration management strategy

- Automating acceptance testing, from analysis to implementation

- Testing capacity and other non-functional requirements

- Implementing continuous deployment and zero-downtime releases

- Managing infrastructure, data, components and dependencies

- Navigating risk management, compliance, and auditing Whether you're a developer, systems administrator, tester, or manager, this book will help your organization move from idea to release faster than ever--so you can deliver value to your business rapidly and reliably.

source: goodreads.com

4. Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and Devops Principles at Scale

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Leading-Transformation-Applying-Devops-Principles/dp/1942788010

Leading-edge companies like Amazon and Google are applying DevOps and Agile principles to deliver large software projects faster than anyone thought possible. But most executives don’t understand how to transform their current legacy systems and processes to scale these principles across their organizations.

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.

source: goodreads.com

5. Practical DevOps: Harness the power of DevOps to boost your skill set and make your IT organization perform better

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Practical-DevOps-Harness-organization-perform/dp/1785882872

About This Book:
Get to know the background of DevOps so you understand the collaboration between different aspects of an IT organization and a software developer
Improve your organization's performance to ensure smooth production of software and services
Deploy top-quality software and ensure software maintenance and release management with this practical guide

Who This Book Is For:
This book is aimed at developers and system administrators who wish to take on larger responsibilities and understand how the infrastructure that builds today's enterprises works. This book is also great for operations personnel who would like to better support developers. You do not need to have any previous knowledge of DevOps.

What You Will Learn:
Appreciate the merits of DevOps and continuous delivery and see how DevOps supports the agile process
Understand how all the systems fit together to form a larger whole
Set up and familiarize yourself with all the tools you need to be efficient with DevOps
Design an application that is suitable for continuous deployment systems with Devops in mind
Store and manage your code effectively using different options such as Git, Gerrit, and Gitlab
Configure a job to build a sample CRUD application
Test the code using automated regression testing with Jenkins Selenium
Deploy your code using tools such as Puppet, Ansible, Palletops, Chef, and Vagrant
Monitor the health of your code with Nagios, Munin, and Graphite
Explore the workings of Trac—a tool used for issue tracking

source: oreilly.com

5 Blogs to Follow on DevOps

Here is a list of 5 Blogs about DevOps you should follow and read:

1. DevOps.com https://devops.com/

DevOps.com is comprised of thought leaders who understand both DevOps and how to create compelling, informative content. The team behind DevOps.com has real-world experience in technology, cloud, online media, DevOps, IT and startups. The DevOps.com management team and board of advisors is made up of world-class talent, including Werner Vogels' weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems.

2. AllThingsDistributed.com https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/

3. HighScalability.com http://highscalability.com/

Why Does The High Scalability Site Exist? To help you build successful scalable websites.

This site tries to bring together all the lore, art, science, practice, and experience of building scalable websites into one place so you can learn how to build your website with confidence.

When it becomes clear you must grow your website or die, most people have no idea where to start. It's not a skill you learn in school or pick up from a magazine article on a plane flight home. No, building scalable systems is a body of knowledge slowly built up over time from hard won experience and many failed battles. Hopefully this site will move you further and faster along the learning curve of success.

Makers of popular web sites eventually run into this all important question: How do I scale? Every builder of successful web sites must answer and that question and put their answers into practice.

source: highscalability.com

4. AgileSysadmin.com https://agilesysadmin.net/

5. Dev2Ops.org http://dev2ops.org/

Dev2Ops.org is an independent site that examines current IT Management and Web Operations issues through technical discussion, interviews, and commentary.

5 of the Best DevOps Podcasts

As the Podcast frenzy is growing, we believe you would love to subscribe to these podcasts on DevOps:

1. Azure DevOps Podcast http://azuredevopspodcast.clear-measure.com/

The Azure DevOps Podcast is a show for developers and devops professionals shipping software using Microsoft technologies. Each show brings you hard-hitting interviews with industry experts innovating better methods and sharing success stories. Listen in to learn how to increase quality, ship quickly, and operate well. Hosted by Jeffrey Palermo and sponsored by Clear Measure, Inc.

2. DevOps and Docker Talk https://podcast.bretfisher.com/

Clips and interviews from Bret Fisher Docker and DevOps YouTube Live show. Topics cover Docker and container tools like Kubernetes, Swarm, AWS, Cloud tech, DevOps, and the full software lifecycle supply chain. 

3. DevOps Cafe Podcast http://devopscafe.org/

In this interview driven show, John Willis and Damon Edwards take a pragmatic look at the technology, tools, and business developments behind the emerging DevOps movement.

4. DevOps Radio https://devopsradio.libsyn.com/

DevOps Radio is a CloudBees-sponsored podcast series. Hosting experts from around the industry, the show dives into what it takes to successfully develop, deliver and deploy software in today’s ever-changing business environment. From DevOps to Docker, each episode features real-world insights and a few stories, tips, industry scoop and more. Our goal is to offer up a variety of experts, but you’ll hear from CloudBees own experts from time-to-time, too.

5. DevOps on AWS Radio https://stelligent.com/podcast/

On DevOps on AWS Radio, we cover topics around applying DevOps principles and practices such as Continuous Delivery on the Amazon Web Services cloud. This is what we do at Stelligent for our customers. We’ll bring listeners into our conversations as we speak to engineers who’ve recently published on our blog and we’ll be reaching out to the wider DevOps on AWS community to get their thoughts and insights.

source:stelligent.com

Bonus: 5 Twitter accounts about DevOps to Follow

According to Tech Republic  https://techrepublic.com/ here is a list of Top 5 Twitter Accounts about DevOps:

• Gene Kim: @RealGeneKim

Kim, co-author of The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win and The DevOps Handbook, frequently tweets about all things DevOps. He's presented at dozens of companies and conferences. He is also interested in security and compliance, and how IT organizations can transform their operations.

• Patrick Debois: @patrickdebois

Debois, IT consultant and co-author of The DevOps Handbook, is responsible for coining the term "DevOps" and hosting the first DevOpsDays event in 2009. On his Twitter, he is "bridging the gap between creativity and technology with a #devops mindset," tweeting useful DevOps tips with humor and GIFs.

• Jennifer Davis: @sigje

Davis, a senior software engineer at Chef Software, is co-author of Effective DevOps and organizer of DevOpsDays Silicon Valley. She gives frequent presentations about DevOps, tech culture, and monitoring, and offers tutorials on a variety of technical topics. Davis often tweets about DevOps and the tech industry.

• Jez Humble: @jezhumble

Humble, co-author of The DevOps Handbook, Lean Enterprise, and Continuous Delivery, has spent his career working with code, infrastructure, and product development in companies across three continents. As co-founder of DevOps Research and Assessment LLC, Humble frequently tweets from DevOps events.

• Charity Majors: @mipsytipsy

Majors, the cofounder and engineer at data analysis startup Honeycomb and a former Facebook production engineering manager, tweets about her experiences working with DevOps. Her feed is entertaining as well as informative, with insights into programming and complex systems.

Share your Lists on DevOps with us

We hope you will enjoy these lists and that will find them useful. If you have any recommendations, please send us your lists.