10 Devops Books That Separate Experts from Amateurs

Gene Kim, a key figure in the DevOps community and bestselling author of The Phoenix Project, brings authoritative insight to this updated edition. Drawing from extensive research and real-world case studies, including contributions from Nicole Forsgren, you’ll learn practical methods to scale DevOps beyond IT departments to entire organizations. The book dives into creating agile, reliable, and secure technology infrastructures, featuring examples from Adidas to the US Air Force. If you’re seeking to improve your organization’s digital transformation with tested frameworks and measurable outcomes, this book offers a solid foundation without overpromising.

Unlike most DevOps books that focus purely on technical pipelines, Julien Vehent blends security expertise with practical DevOps workflows to tackle cloud service vulnerabilities head-on. Drawing from his role leading Firefox Operations Security at Mozilla, Vehent walks you through embedding security layers into continuous integration, delivery, and infrastructure automation. You’ll gain concrete skills like anomaly detection, risk assessment, and incident response illustrated by detailed case studies such as the Caribbean breach. This book is best suited if you’re already familiar with Linux and DevOps basics and want to deepen your ability to safeguard cloud environments effectively.

This personalized book explores the fundamental concepts central to DevOps culture and collaboration, providing a tailored framework that aligns with your specific industry and role. It dissects core principles such as continuous integration, communication practices, automation strategies, and organizational change management, offering a structured approach to fostering agile teamwork. The tailored content cuts through generic advice, focusing on actionable methodologies to build and sustain a DevOps mindset within your unique operational context. By addressing collaboration barriers and cultural transformation, this book helps you implement foundational DevOps strategies that enhance efficiency and resilience in software delivery.

What if everything you knew about software delivery performance was wrong? Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim challenge the notion that software delivery speed and quality can't be a competitive advantage. Drawing from four years of rigorous research and statistical analysis, they reveal how to measure and improve your technology teams' performance through targeted capabilities like continuous delivery and lean management. You’ll find precise metrics and evidence-backed strategies that help management at all levels understand what drives high-performing technology organizations. While technical leaders and executives will gain the most, anyone involved in digital transformation can extract insights on aligning technology with business outcomes.

Drawing from his extensive experience as Accenture's global DevOps lead, Mirco Hering presents a practical roadmap to help you modernize legacy IT systems through DevOps and Agile principles. You'll gain insights into reshaping organizational culture, empowering teams, and leveraging technology to elevate IT performance beyond traditional manufacturing mindsets. The book details challenges legacy organizations face and offers strategies to foster collaboration and creativity essential for today's high-performing IT environments. Chapters explore integrating Lean concepts with DevOps and navigating cultural shifts, making it especially relevant if you're managing IT transformations in established enterprises.

What if everything you knew about DevOps adoption was wrong? Mikael Krief argues that success hinges less on tools alone and more on effectively integrating culture with automation. Drawing from his extensive experience in software development and cloud technologies, he dives deep into practical usage of Terraform, Kubernetes, Jenkins, and Azure DevOps, helping you build scalable infrastructure as code and robust CI/CD pipelines. You’ll explore containerization with Docker and strategies like blue-green deployment that reduce downtime. This book suits application developers and sysadmins ready to move beyond basics and embed modern DevOps techniques into real-world projects.

This tailored book provides a detailed exploration of techniques essential for securing cloud-based DevOps workflows and infrastructure. It offers a personalized framework that addresses cloud-native security challenges specific to your operational environment, including threat identification, risk mitigation strategies, and automated security integration within CI/CD pipelines. By focusing on practical methodologies such as zero trust architectures, container security, and infrastructure as code safeguards, it cuts through irrelevant advice to fit your specific context. The book systematically develops security protocols tailored to your organization’s size, industry, and compliance requirements, equipping you with strategies to anticipate and protect against evolving threats within your DevOps environments.

When Bradley Smith first realized how many professionals find themselves thrown into DevOps roles without a roadmap, he crafted a practical manual to bridge that gap. This book walks you through core DevOps skills like infrastructure as code with Ansible, containerization with Docker, orchestration using Kubernetes, and building CI/CD pipelines. Smith’s chapters on security policies and monitoring stacks provide concrete techniques to protect and observe your systems effectively. If you're navigating the chaos of a modern DevOps environment and need a clear, hands-on approach to mastering essential tools and troubleshooting, this guide offers a grounded, straightforward path without unnecessary complexity.

When Mikael Krief recognized the growing complexity of cloud infrastructure, he aimed to simplify managing it through Infrastructure as Code using Terraform. You learn to write and automate Terraform configurations to provision cloud resources across Azure, AWS, and GCP, deploy Kubernetes clusters, and integrate CI/CD pipelines. The book breaks down practical challenges like state management, testing configurations, and troubleshooting common errors, offering actionable insights especially in chapters on Terraform Cloud and compliance security. If you're a developer or DevOps engineer familiar with Azure and scripting, this book sharpens your ability to scale infrastructure reliably.

When Michael Kaufmann first realized that many DevOps teams struggle to fully leverage GitHub's potential, he set out to create a detailed roadmap for improvement. Drawing from over 20 years in IT consulting and leadership, Kaufmann breaks down how to use GitHub's Issues, Projects, Actions, and Advanced Security features to boost software delivery speed and quality. You'll learn to measure performance effectively, shift security left, and adopt lean management practices tailored for GitHub's ecosystem. This book suits developers, DevOps engineers, and managers aiming to integrate DevSecOps and elevate their team's workflow with practical, targeted strategies.

What if everything you knew about server management was wrong? Jeff Geerling argues that simplicity and human-centric tools like Ansible can transform how you handle infrastructure. Drawing from his extensive experience managing anywhere from single servers to thousands, he guides you through using Ansible to automate provisioning and configuration with clarity and precision. You'll gain practical skills in scaling DevOps processes, writing playbooks, and managing complex environments efficiently. This book suits those comfortable with command line and scripting who want to deepen their infrastructure automation expertise without getting lost in overly complex solutions.

Dr. Aruna Ravichandran's perspective shifted significantly as she challenged the traditional divide between development and operations teams, advocating for a unified approach to software delivery. This book equips you with insights on removing bottlenecks and dependencies to speed up defect-free software development, automating continuous delivery pipelines, and leveraging real-time behavioral analytics for virtualized production testing. It dives into selecting meaningful DevOps metrics and integrating agile methods to enhance operational support and customer experience. If you’re an IT leader aiming to harmonize rapid software innovation with operational resilience, this book offers a well-founded blueprint supported by Ravichandran's extensive experience in product marketing and DevOps strategy.