Ask HN: Which books describe modern devops? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which books describe modern devops?

82 pointsxstartup22 comments

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems https://g.co/kgs/9QF2Kv

The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations https://g.co/kgs/1cffqN

The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit https://g.co/kgs/ULqmRc

DevOps: A Software Architect's Perspective https://g.co/kgs/trJVDi

Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale https://g.co/kgs/LTMEay

It may not be clear from the search, but the SRE book is freely available online: https://landing.google.com/sre/book.html

Do you think devops and sre work are the same thing?

In my experience, devops interviews are mostly concerned with your ability to write scripts against APIs and operate puppet or similar tools.

SRE interviews usually assume you will be working with home grown configuration management, they test programming and a lot more Linux and Unix basics.

Just my observation from interviewing for both titles.

Ask 15 people what "DevOps" is and you'll get 15 diff opinions. It's a not well defined term and companies use it for all sort of things.

If by "modern devops" you mean "they say it's appropriate in a Cloud Native environment" here's some I like or are on my reading list:

  * Seeking SRE

  * Database Reliability Engineering: Designing and Operating Resilient Database Systems

  * The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality

  * Infrastructure as Code: Managing Servers in the Cloud

  * Cloud Native Infrastructure

  * the Scuba Paper from Facebook Research

  * Kubernetes in Action

  * Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

  * Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment
 
  * Cloud Native: Designing Change-tolerant Software

  * Understanding The Linux Memory Manager <-- kind of old (ie references the coming 64bit memory transitions), but super good

  * Spring Microservices in Action <--- read even if you're not a Java or Spring head, asks questions like, "maybe you should think about service discovery, routing, tracing, etc"

This one seems like a great list. Thanks for sharing.

The most fundamental DevOps book -> The Phoenix Project: https://goo.gl/84ELVc

Hm, no it's not. That book is geared mostly towards product owners, VP of Engineering, Team Managers, CTOs and the like.

The Practice of System and Network Administration, Tom Limoncelli and Christine Hogan.

The Practice of Cloud System Administration: Designing and Operating Large Distributed Systems, Volume 2 -- by the above plus Strata Chalup.

You need both.

Probably not exactly what you are asking, but "Site Reliability Engineering" from Google is available to read on-line:

https://landing.google.com/sre/book.html

Like the SRE book from Google. Its also worth checking out how companies such as Netflix put reliability into practice.

Spinnaker

https://www.spinnaker.io/

Chaos Monkey

https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey

Principles of Chaos Engineering

http://principlesofchaos.org/

The other recommendations here are pretty good. I'd add "Infrastructure as Code" as well.

Chinuoachebe

How do you define "modern devops"?

I wasn’t doing a lot of “ops” type stuff at the time but I get the impression that a few years ago some people were using the term to mean “you build it, you run it”, without necessarily requiring as much tooling and infrastructure as seems to be expected today.

Modern devops == configuration management, CI tools, and expectation that you at least take an interest in containerisation.

(I tend to feel that, at least until you get to quite a large scale, there’s still a fair amount of value in “developers who aren’t scared to poke production servers when needed”, but it doesn’t really seem accepted to use the word “devops” to describe that kind of setup.)

Not ancient, I suppose :)

Yeah, but what about the other word from the term? It's not well-defined and its definition varies vastly from person to person.

I think the downvotes are not earned here -- devops as a way to work is relatively new, so one could say all of it is modern. That's where the question is probably headed.

Modern devops as in what used to be sysadmin..

Downvoting this is just being disillusional..

Take a look at the DevOps job postings of lately, tell me that what employers wants you to do is not exactly the same as you did 10 years ago as a sysadmin..

I don't disagree with you but I'd point out that the creation of DevOps was based on the idea that the bridge between Sysadmins and Developers was too large. So why don't we train up some developers on Sysadmin skills?

At least at my company, with two exceptions, if you want to be part of the DevOps team you need to pass a developer interview first.

x2.

I think any collection of Dilbert comics is an appropriate guide.

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