Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale

Great Product

Could've read same from a management book

Read free blog posts instead. This book would have been good if it contained only the research the authors did, perhaps in 50 or so pages. Instead, with 400+ pages, it feels that they took the opportunity of a sponsorship to write the book and filled it with lots of non-technical stuff that you can read on BBC News or any other non-technical source. Rubbish and a waste of time & money!

Despite having been around for quite some year, there is still no agreement on what is DevOps. Etymologically, the word is the result of the merging of Developer and Operations. In this sense, the term suggests a person that has the knowledge to cover both positions, thus reducing the problems that use(d) to arise in between the development of an application and its deployment in production. This view is often coupled with the concept of automation, mainly in the cloud scenario. Still, some believe that this definition is very remissive and plain wrong, claiming DevOps is a movement, a way to think. Essential DevOps, a recently released book, enters this diatribe and tries to bring some light in this endless debate giving us all THE answer. The authors see DevOps as a culture and want to discuss the technical, cultural, and managerial challenges of implementing and maintaining a DevOps culture in a company. Before getting into the details, a quick note: this book is not about technical stuff. There is not a single page dedicated to a tool, not even those meant to help team collaboration. The first chapter of this very thin book tries to get the reader an idea of what DevOps truly is. The many different ways the community describes DevOps are given and then demystified. This is referred to as the DevOps misconceptions. Finally, we are revealed the truth: DevOps is a culture, the culture of teams working together, communicating their intentions and the issues that they run into, dynamically adjusting in order to work towards shared goals. Next, now that the sinful reader has been enlighten, we find all the remaining chapters dedicated to the many different aspects of this team working smoothly in synergy. Through the pages the authors argument about team affinity and collaboration, from the hiring process up to collaboration. The many different types of people that populate planet Earth are described. There is not much more to say, really. I have honestly not understood at all what this book has to do with DevOps: the first two chapters quickly tell what DevOps is not. The rest of the book seems a quick guide dedicated to HR Professionals with advices on how to hire people to build up a team with the perfect chemistry, taking into account skills, character and ambitions. While the information is interesting and possibly correct (I'm no HR), I see no relationship with DevOps, since all of this is true for every kind of profession and, in the case of IT, methodology. The book feels like a sermon that paints DevOps as something similar to a religion of love and synergy. In this sense, the book strongly reminds me of Continuous Delivery and DevOps: A Quickstart Guide which has nothing to do with neither Continuous Integration nor DevOps. As a final note, while I do recognize that everyone has the right to describe what DevOps is, I guess that Google is not willing to hire a gardener to cover a DevOps position, even if this person is a great team player with a very positive attitude towards work and people. Somehow I guess they are interested in people with knowledge and interest of automation, cloud and containers. As usual, you can find more reviews on my personal blog: books.lostinmalloc.com. Feel free to pass by and share your thoughts!

A great book on the culture and ideas behind DevOps. There are so many useful subjects covered that are relevant not only to technologists but also management.

This book is not about devops practices or devops culture; the items of the book are about job organization at very general level. Is not a bad book but is not a devops book

Good

I actually met both of the authors when they were teaching a course on DevOps and Chef at the Velocity Conference in 2015, and I can say this this book is nothing less than an excellent distillation of all of the humor, insight, and pure devops passion that they demonstrated throughout that day. Though written with management in mind -- those with the most immediate power to affect the corporate culture -- I would recommend this to anybody with even a passing interest in what devops is, what it can make possible, and how to put your company into the right cultural and organizational place to make wonderful devopsy things happen. This book is destined to be a primary part of the devops corpus for years to come.

Ich habe einen guten Einstieg in das DevOps Thema gesucht und mich auf OReilly verlassen aber wurde leider herb enttäuscht. Das Buch verliert sich in SJW Themen, überfliegt wichtige Prinzipien nur sehr grob (zB nur je ein Drittel einer Seite zu ITIL und Agile, kein Wort zu Lean) oder erwähnt diese überhaupt erst gar nicht. Gleich die ersten beiden Kapitel versuchen scheinbar "devops" zu definieren aber es bleibt nur bei sehr wenigen und seichten Stichworten und komplizierten, schwammigen Formulierungen, die folgenden Kapitel werden nicht besser. Viel schlimmer ist die Tatsache, dass auch in den Kapiteln zu "Tools" kaum etwas gezeigt oder mit ein bisschen Tiefe erklärt wird - stattdessen wiederholt nahezu jede einzelne Seite die Mantras: "Es kommt darauf an, was man aus den devops Prinzipien macht" (ohne diese klar zu erläutern oder Möglichkeiten auszuzeigen) "Tools sind nicht devops aber es gibt praktische Tools!" (wobei kein einziges davon erklärt oder gezeigt wird) "Tools ersetzen Menschen und Kommunikation nicht und denkt doch an die armen, ausgegrenzten Randgruppen!" Das einzige was an dem Buch gut ist, sind einige wenige sehr gut gewählte Zitate und man ist wesentlich besser aufgehoben, die Originale dieser Zitate zu lesen statt Effective devops. In diesem Buch findet man nur sehr seichte Oberflächlichkeit, ständig die gleichen Aussagen und es gibt überhaupt keinen technischen Inhalt wobei aber auch die menschliche Seite und die devops Prinzipien und deren Herkunft sehr viel zu kurz kommen. Zudem ist jedes (auch kurze) Kapitel in mindestens 15-25 Unter- und Unter-Unterpunkte geteilt und jeder davon ist kaum länger als 200 Worte; man kämpft sich also durch ein seichtes, schlecht strukturiertes Puzzle an Wort- und Definitions-Fetzen ohne Substanz. Der echte Inhalt lässt sich leicht auf unter 50 Seiten eingedampft und dann fehlen einem dennoch wichtige Informationen, aber auf über 300 Seiten ausgebreitet ist es einfach nur viel zu dünn und irritierend. Ich kann dieses Buch daher wirklich niemandem empfehlen und würde sowohl technisch Interessierten als auch dem Management viel eher zum "Phoenix Project" und "DevOps Handbook" raten da diese Bücher fundierte und gut strukturierte Inhalte und damit ein klares Verständnis des Themas liefern und einen guten Einstieg bieten.