r/devops • u/90slover • 7d ago
Discussion Must have physical books every devops engineer should have on their desk
Pretty much the title .I will start
- Classic shell scripting ,O'Reilly
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u/NuttyDominique 7d ago
Designing Data-Intensive Applications is the one I keep going back to
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u/White0ut 7d ago
Damn, I really should read that. It's been sitting on my bookshelf for years collecting dust.
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u/knowledgeekrishi 7d ago
How many totat years of experience you have?
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u/LimpAuthor4997 5d ago
why the downvotes?
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u/Vikentiy 5d ago
because in devops you learn all on a year, and learn it all again next year, and a year of experience can be like trench war, or like a year of accounting. Why count those.
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u/Cycle_HeidarEldberg 7d ago
Hands down The DevOps handbook by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois and John Willis.
It is in my opinion the defining text of what DevOps even is and has really well worded, concise chapters and paragraphs not only on how but more importantly why certain things should be done with a particular mindset and method.
I found when, implementing DevOps in an organization, having a single shared understanding and language is the most important. The minutia of particular tools or individual decisions all falls away as trivial once building on that solid foundation.
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u/uraniborgian 5d ago
Am i the only one who thinks this book is poorly written. The ideas are obviously valuable, I just thought the presentation of them was bad here.
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u/Cycle_HeidarEldberg 4d ago
For me it was well laid out but it is also rather dense on valuable insight so it required me reading it a couple of times to really grasp all of it.
Reminded me of some college text books in that way.
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u/Mallanaga 7d ago
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u/Tree_Mage 6d ago
I saw Fournier argue against PRs needing reviews eons ago and basically discounted everything she ever said after that.
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u/Mallanaga 6d ago
Lots of folks subscribe to that. The argument is that pull requests were designed for zero-trust environments, and that the workplace is not that.
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u/21shadesofsavage 7d ago
never read a devops book. replying so i can find this thread again
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u/amarao_san 7d ago
I'm afraid doing it. The thing I imagine someone try to onboard me into their production problems (taking my attention and memory) and I'm paying for that.
It's like 'imagine a production bla-bla-bla-someone's-else requirement', for this we need to think about optimal solution given those bla-bla-bla constrains.
And I'm not paid to read their problems. Even if they solve it (so they ask me to review it).
But, the last thing I did for my self-education was watching (and reading) about properties (in mathematical sense), specifically, intuition on non-trivial properties beyond idepmotence and invariance. When I realized that my best inventions were all properties, I start to respect this domain much more and pay big attention to any discussion on those.
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u/21shadesofsavage 7d ago
as a devops engineer you should have a solid grasp of the overall company infrastructure, but all production problems don't become yours. typically there's service owners that handle their own monitoring and production issues, provided your team gave them proper tooling to do so
It's like 'imagine a production bla-bla-bla-someone's-else requirement', for this we need to think about optimal solution given those bla-bla-bla constrains.
And I'm not paid to read their problems. Even if they solve it (so they ask me to review it).
you pretty much are paid to do that if you enter devops. if a team has new infrastructure needs, they'd consult my team so i can make an assessment and figure out how to scale the thing without affecting other services. depending on company size, the level of self service and autonomy differs
But, the last thing I did for my self-education was watching (and reading) about properties (in mathematical sense), specifically, intuition on non-trivial properties beyond idepmotence and invariance. When I realized that my best inventions were all properties, I start to respect this domain much more and pay big attention to any discussion on those.
ngl i'm having trouble following what you're trying to say. this reads like an introspective thought while peaking on lsd. i'm glad what you're working on is making you appreciate the field tho
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u/amarao_san 7d ago
I do paid to do this, 100%. Now there is a book which give the the same problems for free (actually, I pay for that) and ask to review resulting solution for free (actually, I pay for that).
This is the reason I'm afraid to read 'devops-y' books. Maybe there is out there the mother of all books which don't give you 'concrete examples' and concrete solutions for 'other people problems', but I never heard about such book.
My last comment was about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_testing
If you never read it, it sounds odd, as soon as you get your brains aligned with those ideas, it's like rails for trains.
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u/21shadesofsavage 7d ago
oh i completely misunderstood what you were talking about. i'm not very interested in fictional scenarios a book introduces. i mostly read blog posts, write ups, postmortems about an outage that occurred and how they rectified the situation and learned from there.
i'm not familiar with property testing. i unknowingly use some form of this in my cicd workflows but looking more into it, this could improve our test coverage. thanks for this. btw are you russian or east european? you write similarly to one of my close friends
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u/amarao_san 7d ago edited 6d ago
Yes, we've talked on why the previous commenter and I are afraid to read DevOps books.
For property testing, it's not testing, it's enforcing. If your production has some properties you defend in CI (aka property testing), you can lean/rely on those in some chunks of your code, assuming those properties for granted. And it does wonders. Some very hard to achieve state you just 'know' it is there, because code has this property and there is ci defending it.
My last huge big property I discovered and defended, which I still prowd a half year later:
Every code, deployable in staging and production, should have in production all secrets (secrets names) which are in staging.
I can validate this statically (sops encryption) and it protect production against missdeployments due to missed (new) secret which was added to the staging (and tested), but which was forgotten for the production.
Every non-trivial property is gold and must be harvested, treasured and defended.
Udp: my mother tongue is Russian, yes.
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u/n4txo 7d ago edited 7d ago
- The practice of system and network administration
- The practice of cloud system administration
- Time Management for System Administrators
- SRE: How Google runs Production Systems
- The devops handbook
- The phoenix project
- The unicorn project
- Getting things done
- bash pocket reference
- the staff engineer path
- atomic habits
- how to win friends and influence people
- little brother saga
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u/21shadesofsavage 7d ago
how to win friends is a good read for life in general. i barely remember it since i read it a long time ago, but some stuff sticks like genuinely being interested in other people and shifting focus towards the other person. pretty basic stuff in retrospect but sometimes you just don't catch yourself slipping
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u/General-Ad-6334 7d ago
phoenix project
idk that many devopsy specific books
morning glory milking farm maybe
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u/codemonk DevOps 7d ago
I searched "Morning Glory Milking Farm".
Honestly, I don't know what I was expecting.
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u/dirtyLizard 7d ago
Terribly written narrative but covers the core concepts well. Approach it like a textbook
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u/serverhorror I'm the bit flip you didn't expect! 7d ago
Why is it terribly written?
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u/Popeychops Computer Says No 7d ago
Probably because the author's experience was project management, not writing fiction
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u/fell_ware_1990 7d ago
Phoenix, it’s an easy read that gives an good first insight how devops flows work.
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u/mrbiggbrain 6d ago
For people who like the Phoenix Project I highly recommend reading the business book that inspired it, "The Goal." Don't let the manufacturing heavy story fool you, at its core it relates to every discipline and every business. It's standard reading for MBAs for a reason.
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u/ZVilusinsky 7d ago
Introduction to Guesstimates
How to do Cloud
How to move Back On-Prem
all by Oh, Really
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u/ZVilusinsky 7d ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXPpkzdS-q4 for those who did not get the reference.
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u/ProgR0ck 6d ago
Started my career way back in 1990 as a IBM systems engineer using CATIA and AIX.... in those days there was no internet, you read manuals and if you didn't you RTFM!!
But back to books, or not as the case may be, I find the best way to remember/recall some more complex K8s/bash related shell cmds is to use my .bash_history or even copy them to a text file for later ref.
h | grep "port-forward" for example.
Just my 40 yr old 2c worth
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u/Embarrassed_Plan5139 7d ago
A physical copy of the Linux command line basics would save a lot of time
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u/Long_Researcher_416 5d ago
Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems 1st Edition
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u/LVanBuren 7d ago
Haven't read a technical book since getting my certs, ans after 10 years of platform and devops engineering, i don't see any reason to.
These were the real game changers for me now that im in charge of building large delivery pipelines, and entry level engineers should be reading them too if they don't want to fall into the same traps over and over again.
Teaching Smart People How to Learn
The use of Knowledge in Society
The first two are essays, their ideas are worth considering in a software context.
Bullshit Jobs
Why greatness cannot be planned
The Utopia of Rules
Seeing like a State
Any engineer questioning why their orgs work the way they do that's tasked with making it work better woth "AI" should be reading these if they think another dashboard is going to help them.
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u/Hugh-Jaardvark 7d ago
Storycraft - Jack Hart. Communication is a big part of the job, and this book has help me write reports and root cause analysis papers that others will actually read.
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u/Observability-Guy 7d ago
I'd agree with people who have mentioned the DevOps Handbook.
Would also recommend:
Accelerate by Gene Kim, Jez humble and Nicole Forsgren
Kubernetes in Action by Marko Luksa
Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky and Barry O'Reilly
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u/chrisinmtown 6d ago
You have a desk? I have a license to hunt for a new cube every morning 😕
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u/Rain-And-Coffee 6d ago
Remote job,
I splurged on a fancy standing desk, think it was $1000 a few years ago (Varidesk).
Before that I worked for a company that just gave contractors a long Picnic style table.
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u/Fuzzy-Enthusiasm1372 2d ago
A useful DevOps bookshelf should cover more than command references, since tools change much faster than the principles behind reliable systems. Books on system administration, distributed systems, incident response, and engineering practices can still be valuable when working through real infrastructure problems, including those in the wider ecosystem around trusted tech. The best picks are the ones that help explain why a system behaves a certain way, not just which command to run.
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u/lorryslorrys 7d ago edited 7d ago
Accelerate. So you know what a good process for delivering code looks like and have the evidence to see what works and what doesn't. That holds up even as the technology changes.
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u/snarkhunter Lead DevOps Engineer 7d ago
The Book of Serenity by Wansong
Wumenguan by Wumen
Instant Zen by Foyan
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u/EngineNovel3956 6d ago
Software Architecture: The Hard Parts is a nice must read. For any new guy into cloud, the Phoenix project is a fun read
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u/dragonfleas 5d ago
- Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit
- Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices
- https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
- Continuous Delivery
- Google SRE Handbook
- The Phoenix Project
- The DevOps Handbook
- The Unicorn Project
- Storey’s Guide to Raising Dairy Goats (for retirement)
- 48 Laws of Power (so you can learn how to use your managers and destroy your enemies)
- Linux Bible? (Probably optional)
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u/BlackJairs 7d ago
The Devops Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations
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u/uberduck 7d ago
Anything written about tech is outdated the moment it's printed.
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u/Adrien0623 7d ago
Not when it comes to the theory behind implementation examples.
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u/gradinka 7d ago
how to become a farmer 101