Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale 1st Edition

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.

The book is an outstanding exploration of the connection between culture and tools in implementing DevOps, in particular it highlights how all the expensive, fancy technical tools in the world will not make you successful if your organization has a poor culture. Technical skills and cultural skills cannot be considered mutually exclusive, nor are they things that can be addressed separately. Jennifer Davis and Katherine Daniels have written a fantastic resource for technologists, managers, and those who have only heard about this "devops thing." I highly recommend this book!

The subtitle says it all. This book has an extremely strong emphasis on the cultural aspects for creating an atmosphere suitable for the development of a solid devops practice. It has a liberal focus on the presumed importance of team (and workforce) diversity (ethnic background, race, gender, sexuality, age, etc.) and its centrality to creating a devops culture. This belief sets the mood of the entire book, from the topics, to the tone, to the writing style. Its difficult to find a page where this theme isn't drilled home in one way or another - sometimes plainly, sometimes more subtlety. For example, there is a sidebar section describing the personal challenges of a deaf (female) developer. While the story was surely interesting, I couldn't help but feel that it was out of place. This kind of thing is everywhere in this book, to the point of being distracting.If you are expecting advice or direction on hardcore tooling or technology, this is definitely not the book for you. It is much more in line with HR and management-themed books on building diverse teams, handling conflicts, building collaboration, and then applying everything at scale. The authors even point out that people might be surprised by the apparent lopsided emphasis, especially when compared to just about every book in this space. You could change the word "Devops" in the title to just about any corporate practice you wanted to and much of the book could stay as is.The authors make a strong and compelling case for devops as a cultural change - for them it is far less about the tools, processes, and technologies associated - it's about the people. This rings true with my own experiences in this space. However, I do not believe they made the case for such a strong emphasis on diversity as a requirement for success in that change. This premise so strongly permeates the book that one wonders if they were trying to convince themselves of its centrality. It's as if they believe a typical IT organization (which they point out is staffed mostly by white, cisgender males) couldn't possible be successful at making the cultural transformation.Still, the down-to-earth tips they present are tried-and-true. I found the chapter on collaboration particularly useful. All-in-all it's a practical, worthy addition to your bookshelf.

Good introduction to DevOPs, real world insight into companies doing DevOps well such as Etsy makes this worth a read. Authors clearly are clearly writing from real world experience not just academic theories.

I was confused about why so many reviewers view the title as misleading, or the content as not technical enough. This just shows you how diluted terms get by technical marketing departments trying to sell you their wares.The book itself best summarizes what DevOps actually is: "a professional and cultural movement that stresses the iterative efforts to break down information silos, monitor relationships, and repair misunderstandings that arise between teams within an organization."It's about culture, it's about practice, process, beliefs, and tooling... to run IT services with increased agility and reliability. This is of enormous importance to fix our widespread broken siloed organizations and processes, to form a culture of mutual respect and trust even at scale. The highest performing organizations can do this, this book provides a practical set of questions, answers, and stories to help your team on this journey.

read this. and always remind that DevOps is a culture, a movement, a set of ideas, and not a job or a role!

Truly about DevOps, as a cultural and organizational movement. Everything espoused here an bring about the high performance and happiness of teams and organizations. This is no different in value than The Phoenix Project. Want books on tools and tech? They are a dime a dozen. But true organizational excellence for technical teams is something that you can't put a pricetag on.

There is an HR book. The culture discussed in this book is of the Women's Studies variety, not of the colloquial 'DevOps' variety . There is nothing technical in this book. There is no deep dive into DevOps in practice or DevOps culture that would help a beginner in DevOps navigate the field. Avoid this book and buy The DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim if this is your first foray into DevOps literature.