Effective DevOps by Jennifer Davis and Katherine Daniels

The first thing to note is that the full title of this book is "Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale ". It covers many aspects of dev ops; not just the tooling ones that us developers like to read about it. This is good because all the aspects are important. The book really lays upon you the idea that DevOps is about culture. If you don't come away from the book thinking about the non tooling aspects of DevOps, I'd be surprised.

There are 6 parts to the book. I really liked parts I, IV, V and VI. Parts II and III felt like a bit of a slog.

The first part is six short chapters giving an overview of concepts and terms. This was very fast moving and had some good quotes and concepts. It was a lot lighter to read than your typical O'Reilly book while still teaching you what you'd want to know. The "history of dev ops" going back to the first computer felt like a bit much, but it is an intro. I was surprised to see the word "portmanteau" in the book multiple times. I just learned that word last year so I think it could have used a definition. Chapter six is the four pillars of dev ops and came in at 2.5 pages. I liked this as it highlighted something simple to remember as a really important concept.

The next four parts are about the pillars. The first two pillars are collaboration and affinity. It took me most of the week to get through this material. It's management/soft skills type stuff. Unfortunately for me, this is when the typical O'Reilly style showed up. A lot was covered quickly and succinctly. And a lot wasn't new. These sections could have used more examples. I thought there'd be more examples from Etsy since they have such strong practices. Preferably sprinkled through the chapter to aid in alertness. The last chapter of each part covers anti-patterns. The style of these chapters was easier to read and they were shorter. The other two pillars are tools and scaling. Those were easier for me to read. I also felt like there were more case studies sprinkled in for scaling which was helpful. The variety of companies covered in the case studies was also helpful. I also liked the emphasis in the last part for stories and how to use them well.

I did come away with new ways of looking at concepts which is important in this type of books. I like the “new words” like islands instead of silos and thinking about folk models.

I give this book 8 out of 10 horseshoes.


Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book from the publisher for reviewing it on behalf of CodeRanch.