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

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 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.

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!

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.

Interesting read. I purchased the hardcopy and Kindle version (God - I wish you could just pay once!) since it was a decent read. This book is written from a manager level. It covers a ton of human resources things, which I found very odd for an O'Riley book. As far as DevOps goes - there is nothing that really teaches you DevOps. It shows the culture, explains it, but there is no real hands on, get into the weeds type of explanations here. If you want to really get your hands on a great DevOps book, read "The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit" - which will have you sitting in front of your laptop for the next two weeks, as it is filled with step by step exercises that enable you to build an entire CI/CD environment. This book really focuses on how to develop the culture of DevOps, and how to develop that culture with various types of people. I think it is worth reading if you are a manager that is toying with the idea of DevOps and understanding how to work with your team. I don't think this is a book that most O'Riley fans will appreciate as the technical and application pieces seem to be lacking.

Good book

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

Great Product

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

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.