Whether you’re new to DevOps or looking to deepen your expertise, researching and learning from the right DevOps books is essential for mastering modern software delivery practices. The best DevOps books provide insights into key areas such as CI/CD, automation, DevOps culture, cloud infrastructure, security (DevSecOps), site reliability engineering (SRE), and DevOps maturity levels—helping individuals and teams improve efficiency, collaboration, and scalability.
The Role of Release Management in a DevOps World
Read the whitepaper • The Role of Release Management in a DevOps WorldThis guide highlights the best DevOps book recommendations for anyone researching DevOps methodologies, best practices, and emerging trends. Whether you’re studying DevOps pipelines, infrastructure as code (IaC), observability, or governance, these books will serve as valuable resources to enhance your understanding and help you stay ahead in the evolving world of DevOps.
1. The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
This engaging and insightful story presents a fictional DevOps implementation through a narrative framework, making complex concepts accessible and relatable. By weaving together lessons on culture, risk-taking, and trust, it offers a high-level perspective on the organizational challenges that shape DevOps transformations. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or a non-technical reader, this book provides a compelling way to understand different viewpoints and spark meaningful discussions.
2. Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
A foundational masterpiece, this DevOps book is essential reading for DevOps engineers, software developers, and IT professionals. This book provides a comprehensive, practical guide to streamlining software delivery, addressing common pain points, and implementing best practices for build, test, and deployment automation. With real-world examples and actionable insights, it remains a must-read for anyone looking to enhance release reliability, efficiency, and scalability in modern software development.
3. The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
A cornerstone of DevOps literature, this DevOps book is an essential read for anyone looking to enhance agility, reliability, and security in technology organizations. This influential classic blends well-researched case studies, industry best practices, and actionable strategies to help IT teams drive productivity and profitability. Whether you’re a developer, operations engineer, or IT manager, this comprehensive guide offers invaluable insights for mastering DevOps transformation and optimizing software delivery.
4. Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations
Ever wished you could access all the insights from the State of DevOps Reports in one place? This DevOps book delivers exactly that—compiling four years of groundbreaking research by industry experts into a data-driven guide. Perfect for leaders at any level, this book provides a rigorous, evidence-based approach to measuring and improving software delivery performance using statistical analysis. Whether you’re looking to optimize DevOps practices or drive organizational transformation, Accelerate offers invaluable insights backed by real-world data.
5. The DevOps Adoption Playbook: A Guide to Adopting DevOps in a Multi-Speed IT Enterprise
Awarded DevOps 2017 Book of the Year, The DevOps Adoption Playbook recognizes that enterprise-level DevOps comes with a unique set of challenges. As the Global CTO for DevOps Adoption at IBM, author Sanjeev Sharma is uniquely situated to address those concerns. This guide provides “plays” that can be executed for different scenarios and situations based on where your company is on its digital transformation journey, culminating in the creation of a customized game plan.
6. Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale
Bleeding-edge companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix are using Agile and DevOps to great effect, while other organizations are stuck with their slow legacy systems. Leading the Transformation is aimed at giving executives a clear framework for improving development and delivery, as well as bringing the culture up to speed. It’s short, digestible, and covers all of the high-level issues.
7. Starting and Scaling DevOps in the Enterprise
As VP of QA, Release, and Operations at Macy’s.com, Gary Gruver led the journey toward continuous delivery. In this book, he shares his method for structuring improvements across the organization to empower teams to work independently while maintaining alignment. The recommendations are clear, direct, and successful with warnings, pitfalls, and specific metrics for measurement
8. Engineering the Transformation
Organizations aren’t getting the benefits that they expect from their Agile and DevOps implementations. Engineering the Transformation provides systematic approaches to improving how software is developed for a broad range of applications, translating manufacturing and engineering improvements into the language and framework of software, so that companies can understand how to get better.
9. Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale
This DevOps book is a must-read for managers and leaders looking to drive meaningful DevOps transformation. Rather than focusing on tools, processes, or technologies, this book emphasizes the cultural foundations of a successful DevOps implementation, with a strong focus on diversity, collaboration, and conflict resolution. It provides valuable insights into fostering effective teamwork, overcoming organizational challenges, and scaling DevOps practices to create a more inclusive and high-performing environment.
10. Site Reliability Engineering
Not your traditional guide or handbook, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a series of essays written by members and alumni of Google’s SRE organization. Much of the content is specific to Google but provides an interesting perspective into problem-solving approaches. At a relatively hefty 550 pages, you can treat this tome as an anthology of sorts. With no need to read in order, pick and choose the pieces that are most relevant to your interest. Note that Google provides this resource for free on its website, which is linked below.
11. Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems
Similar to The Phoenix Project, Sam Newman uses the device of a fictional company (in this case, a music store) to take readers through the journey of building a microservice architecture. He takes a balanced approach, acknowledging that microservices are not a silver bullet, while also diving into key benefits and challenges. Topics covered include modelling, integration, breaking the monolith, deployment, testing, monitoring, security, scaling and organizational structure.
12. The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit: Automating the Continuous Deployment Pipeline with Containerized Microservices
Useful for beginners, The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit takes a hands-on approach with examples downloaded from GitHub that make it easy to follow along. It is a substantial read that covers why automation is important, all the different steps for automating, and how to do CI/CD.
13. Infrastructure as Code: Managing Servers in the Cloud
Author Kief Morris of ThoughtWorks demonstrates various tools, techniques, and patterns you can use to implement infrastructure as code. Useful for beginner and intermediate system administrators, infrastructure engineers, team leads, and architects, this book is all about modern techniques for using the cloud.
14. Next Gen DevOps: Creating the DevOps Organisation
Next Gen DevOps presents an implementation strategy for merging behaviour-driven development, infrastructure as code, automated testing, monitoring, and continuous integration into a holistic process. It provides historical context and an easily implementable framework for modern businesses to level up with DevOps.
15. Effective DevOps with AWS: Ship faster, scale better, and deliver incredible productivity
Written by a lead member of Medium’s DevOps team, this book explains how to do better DevOps with AWS. It covers topics such as treating infrastructure as code, building a CI/CD deployment pipeline, and scaling applications with containers and serverless computing.
16. Practical DevOps
Practical DevOps is true to its title. Within its pages, you will learn how to create a sample enterprise Java application, explore various code storage and build server options, and then test, deploy, and monitor your code. Developers, system administrators, and operations can all benefit from this prescriptive guide.
17. Measure What Matters
Measure What Matters includes various first-person accounts that describe the benefits of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Drawing from John Doerr’s time at Intel with Andy Grove, this book covers OKR history, fundamentals, and structure, while also expanding upon the concept by introducing a new management model based on CFRs (Conversations, Feedback, Recognition). With many mini case studies from a variety of companies, anyone interested in becoming a better manager or leader can benefit from giving this a look.
18. Architecting for Scale: High Availability for Your Growing Applications
Written for senior software engineers, architects, engineering managers, and directors who build and operate large-scale applications and systems, Architecting for Scale provides processes and best practices drawn from the author’s own experiences at Amazon and New Relic. It is divided into five parts: availability, risk management, services and microservices, scaling applications, and cloud services.
19. Cloud Native Patterns: Designing change-tolerant software
For the intermediate developer, Cloud Native Patterns is a great resource for learning fundamental patterns and practices to build resilient, easily adaptable, web-scale distributed applications that handle massive user traffic and data loads using cloud-native designs. Author Cornelia Davis also provides an excellent introduction to Kubernetes and its myriad benefits.
