We whetted your appetite with our B2B guide to DevOps and now you might be thinking about how you can implement DevOps practices for software development in your organization.
With summer just around the corner, you should add these insightful DevOps books to your business reading list.
The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
Authors: Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford
Publisher: IT Revolution Press
Publication Date: October 2014
Price: $28.95 Hardcover/$7.99 Digital
Problems that happen in an IT organization are different than those that occur in other industries. With The Phoenix Project, readers will learn how to recognize these unique issues, and how they jeopardize development, IT operations and information security. Readers will also learn how implementing DevOps techniques can address these problems.
Told in the unconventional form of a story, authors Kim, Behr and Spafford make learning about DevOps both practical and entertaining. According to the book’s plot description, “Bill is an IT manager … The company’s new IT initiative is … massively over budget and very late. The CEO wants Bill to … fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill’s entire department will be outsourced.”
President and CEO of Red Hat, Inc., Jim Whitehurst, says, “The Phoenix Project is a must read for business and IT executives struggling with the growing complexity of IT.” And Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media states, “The Phoenix Project is a great way to get non-technical managers to understand what developers do. Every person involved in a failed IT project should be forced to read this book.”
Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale
Authors: Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, Barry O’Reilly
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
Publication Date: January 2015
Price: $16.82 Hardcover/$9.99 Digital
The concept of DevOps builds on the principles of Lean and Agile operations. By examining these two principles, authors Humble, Molesky and O’Reilly ask readers to consider how well their organizations respond to changing market conditions, customer needs, and emerging technologies when building software-based products. Through case studies, readers are presented with a practical guide to rethinking every aspect of their operations in order to improve performance significantly.
Editorial reviews are favourable, with Matt Pancino, CEO of Suncorp Business Services, claiming, “To thrive in the digital world, transformation must be more than technology driven — everyone within the organization must collectively work together to adapt. This book provides an essential guide for all leaders to change the way they deliver value to customers.”
For more on agile operations, read our primer on agile marketing.
Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems
Author: Sam Newman
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
Publication Date: February 2015
Price: $45.97 Paperback/$24.99 Digital
Introduce yourself to microservice, a software architecture style. With technologies in this field moving quickly, system developers and administrators need to work together in the process of building, managing and evolving their microservice structures. Author Sam Newman looks at a holistic, DevOps-like approach to this field, and gives readers up-to-date solutions for modelling, integrating, testing, deploying and monitoring microservice offerings.
Open-source software company NGINX wrote about the book’s release on its blog. “Microservices architecture,” says article author Tony Mauro, “is the current state of the art in application development, enabling developers and architects to keep pace with the demand for new apps and better performance across distributed experiences, a plethora of mobile devices, and the emergence of the Internet of Things.”
Be sure to check out Newman’s Google+ Hangout video from February where discussed what microservices can bring to B2B companies.
Designing Delivery: Rethinking IT in the Digital Service Economy
Author: Jeff Sussna
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
Publication Date: June 2015 (early, unedited digital release April, 2014)
Price: $31.20 Paperback
With Designing Delivery, author Jeff Sussna recognizes that software is critical for navigating everyday life. For software development companies, service quality is about making and keeping promises to customers, not just designing software.
This book introduces a transdisciplinary approach to digital service delivery and how it impacts the customer experience. In doing so, it examines what it means to orchestrate a unified approach to operations across front-office and back-office functions, topped with technical and business perspectives.
In a recent interview with DevOps.com, Sussna,the founder of Ingineering.IT, speaks about Design Thinking, one of the key principles on which his book is founded. He says, “There’s a lot of focus on iterative design and user testing, but it’s really all focused on centering your solutions on what users are trying to accomplish and how they understand things and what their needs are.”
DevOps: A Software Architect’s Perspective
Authors: Len Bass, Ingo Weber, Liming Zhu
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Publication Date: May 2015
Publication Date: $32.10 Hardcover/ $17.27 Digital
From Addison-Wesley Professional, publishers of textbooks and computer literature, comes DevOps: A Software Architect’s Perspective. This work includes case studies, references, and practical examples of DevOps, and the implications it has on software developers.
Authors Bass, Weber and Zhu examine how the implementation of DevOps principles will often lead to issues for software architects and architectures, and how these issues largely go ignored. The book also examines ways an organization can implement DevOps practices more efficiently, providing the organizational, technical and operational context to make that happen.
The authors collectively hold an impressive amount of experience. Bass is a senior principal researcher at National ICT Australia Ltd., and is the co-author of two award-winning books in software architecture. Weber is a senior researcher in the Software Systems Research Group at NICTA in Sydney, Australia. He is also an adjunct senior lecturer at CSE at the University of New South Wales. And Zhu is a research group leader and principal researcher at NICTA, with more than 80 peer-review papers published.
Be sure to also check out our guide to the top marketing books of the year.
Main photo of author Joanne Molesky
