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The DevOps Handbook: is it worth reading?
The practical companion to the DevOps movement, organised around flow, feedback and continuous learning.
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- published
- 2021
- key ideas
- 3
- reading path
- 1
The DevOps Handbook
by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis
- Publisher
- IT Revolution
- Year
- 2021
- Edition
- Second edition, updated with newer case studies.
- ISBN
- 9781950508402
Useful when you are: Senior / lead, Manager
Verdict
Should you read it?
Read it if
You want the practical detail behind the Accelerate findings, or you are leading a change programme and need worked organisational examples.
Skip it if
You want a short read. It is long and comprehensive, and the case studies accumulate.
The argument
What it argues
Organised around three ways: improving flow from development to operations, amplifying feedback loops back from production, and creating a culture of continual experimentation and learning.
Testing appears throughout rather than as a chapter. Automated testing is treated as a precondition for flow, production telemetry as the feedback mechanism, and blameless postmortems as the learning practice.
It is the most comprehensive practical treatment of DevOps practice, assembled from a large number of organisational case studies.
Key ideas
Ideas worth taking from it
- 01
The three ways
Flow, feedback, and continual learning. The organising frame for the whole DevOps movement.
- 02
Shift left on quality and security
Move verification earlier and make it automatic, so it is a property of the pipeline rather than a stage appended to it.
- 03
Blameless postmortems
Treat incidents as learning opportunities. A team that fears blame hides information, which is fatal for any function that depends on accurate signals.
Criticism
What has dated, and what it gets wrong
Repetitive, and the case studies are uniformly success stories, which gives an unrealistically smooth impression of transformations that in reality mostly stall. Read Accelerate first for the evidence, then this for the practice.
Reading paths
On our reading paths
Quality in continuous delivery
Book 4 of 5 · Delivery and DevOps
The practical companion: concrete practices for flow, feedback and learning, each with a case study.
1. The Phoenix Project
2. Continuous Delivery
3. Accelerate- 4. The DevOps Handbook (this book)
5. Site Reliability Engineering
Keep reading
What to read next
Reading about quality is cheaper than learning it in production.
QAble runs QA for products in BFSI, gaming, healthcare and SaaS, with engineers who have read these and argued about them. Start with a free QA audit.