DevOps Related Books
We have found all these books below to offer some great lessons and information on the DevOps problem space. We only list books we found highly valuable ourselves, and we strongly recommend reading these. Some of these offer potential solutions to your own problems, where others will give you plenty of "ah-ha!" moments. Most of all, you will see common trends throughout, and see your own challenges in those situations described by others. We are not big fans of just copying others' answers, instead look carefully at the why behind the answer, or the questions asked, and take inspiration from the answers.
We have grouped the books into categories below, but generally they will span categories. For example, Continuous Delivery is primarily about the technical practices involved, but in order to truly implement continuous delivery, a change of mindset and culture towards release and deployment is needed.
The Problem Space
This set of books explores the problems that DevOps is often applied to as a solution. Use these books to help you identify what problems you are trying to solve. Particularly, The Unicorn Project and The Phoenix Project unpack the challenges a traditional approach to IT and software development has in the modern age of digital and the expectations that come with it - fast time to market, proactive feature releases, and so on.
Mindset and Culture
The most difficult part of DevOps is getting the culture right, and bringing everyone on the journey. Ultimately, being successful in changing the approach to ways of working will involve winning the hearts and minds of all involved, not just your champions. A large part of having a successful transformation to a DevOps approach is to embrace and promote the naturally aligned ways of working. This will affect all areas of your business. Be prepared to explain why those outside of tech should also be practicing agile leadership, working to lean principles, and that failing, learning and applying fast will become the norm. Emotional intelligence, psychological safety, and continuous learning all need to be topics on the table for change to be effective and permanent.
Technical Practices
A common application of DevOps follows "People, Processes and Tools". These books cover the processes and tools that can be used to achieve an effective and high performing DevOps approach. Automation, release pipelines, infrastructure as code, cloud, configuration management and more need to become the norm, and not just for software development but for infrastructure and operations management too.
Leadership
More often than not, adopting a DevOps approach will mean undergoing transformational change. In the last couple of DevOps reports, transformational leadership was highlighted as a key factor of success in achieving optimal performance. These books unpack some of the leadership qualities that are important to transformational leadership, and can be applied in a DevOps transformation to ensure your potential is achieved.
Personal Development
Whilst adopting a DevOps approach is a wider piece, these are some books to help you build qualities in yourself that will help you to take the challenges in your stride.
