Fundamentals of DevOps and Software Delivery

By Yevgeniy Brikman

There are many guides out there on how to write software. This book is a guide to software delivery: that is, all the processes, tools, and techniques that are required to run and maintain software in production on an ongoing basis. In particular, this book is a guide to DevOps, a methodology for making software delivery more efficient.

Whereas most books and talks on DevOps focus on culture, values, and organizational structure, I've found that when most people talk about DevOps, what they are really interested in is the mechanics of effective software delivery. That's what this book is all about. It's a hands-on guide that includes dozens of step-by-step examples of how to run production systems. You’ll start with the basics—an app running on a single server—and work your way up to microservices in a Kubernetes cluster with a service mesh, automated deployment pipeline, end-to-end encryption, and more.

By the time you’re done with the book, you will have had hands-on practice with all the core concepts and best practices of modern DevOps and software delivery.

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About the book

This book is for individual contributors in operations (e.g., current and aspiring Site Reliability Engineers, DevOps Engineers, Sysadmins, Operations Engineers, and Release Engineers) who want to level up their knowledge of software delivery, individual contributors in dev (e.g., Software Engineers, Software Developers, Web Developers, and Full Stack Engineers) who want to learn more about the operations side of the house, and managers in engineering (e.g., Engineering Managers, Engineering Directors, CTOs, VPEs, and CIOs) who want to learn how to adopt DevOps practices in their organizations.

  • Ad hoc scripts
  • Configuration management tools
  • Server templating tools
  • Provisioning tools

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  • Server orchestration
  • VM orchestration
  • Container orchestration
  • Serverless orchestration

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  • Trunk-based development
  • Feature toggles
  • Deployment strategies and pipelines

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  • Domain Name System (DNS)
  • Virtual private clouds (VPCs)
  • Network access and hardening
  • Service discovery, service meshes

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  • Relational DBs, schemas
  • NoSQL, NewSQL, queues, streams
  • File storage and CDNs
  • Backup and recovery

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  • Logs and log aggregation
  • Metrics, dashboards, alerts
  • Observability and tracing

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  • Infrastructureless
  • Generative AI
  • Shift left, supply chain security
  • Platform engineering

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Open Source Code Samples

The book includes dozens of code samples for you to try, which you can find here:

https://github.com/brikis98/devops-book

What people are saying

I'm not aware of any other book that provides such practical advice on operations and systems administration in the context of delivering and running software. Jim's book stays refreshingly focused on the real-world aspects of DevOps—what most people actually mean when they use the term—rather than the theory.

Kief Morris, distinguished infrastructure engineer at Thoughtworks and author of Infrastructure as Code

An excellent step-by-step guide to getting practical things done—the kind of thing I wish I'd had when I was starting off.

Niall Murphy, co-founder & CEO of Stanza and co-author of Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems

Meticulously organized, chock full of examples, buoyed by research and practical experience, Fundamentals of DevOps and Software Delivery is another outstanding project from the prolific Yevgeniy “Jim” Brikman. The breadth of technology in this space can feel overwhelming, but Jim manages to isolate the signal from the noise, emphasizing the prevailing industry best practices while smartly identifying pitfalls along the way.

Ben Whaley, staff software engineer at Chime and co-author of UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook

If you want to learn DevOps principles quickly, and learn them in a way that's directly applicable to your problems, buy this book.

Yousif Akbar, principal software engineer at Gruntwork

About the author

Yevgeniy Brikman

Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman is the co-founder of Gruntwork, a company that that offers products & services for setting up world-class DevOps Foundations. He's also the author of two other books published by O'Reilly: Terraform: Up & Running, the definitive book on Terraform and OpenTofu, and Hello, Startup, a hands-on guide to building products, technologies, and teams in a startup.

Previously, Jim spent more than a decade building infrastructure and products that serve hundreds of millions of users at LinkedIn, TripAdvisor, Cisco Systems, and Thomson Financial. For more info, check out ybrikman.com.

A hands-on guide

This book includes dozens of hands-on code examples. Instead of only reading, you get to learn by doing, following the step-by-step instructions to deploy apps, manage infrastructure, configure CI/CD pipelines, and more:

You can find the sample code for the book in this GitHub repo.

Buy now

Fundamentals of DevOps and Software Delivery is available at your local bookstores and the following online stores:

Buy Fundamentals of DevOps and Software Delivery on O'Reilly

Not an O'Reilly subscriber? Get a 30-day trial free with this link!

Blog posts

Blog posts, appendices, and other useful information related to the book.

How to find AMI IDs for Amazon Linux and Ubuntu

· 9 min read · Comments

Learn the several copy-pasteable recipes for programmatically finding the IDs of the latest Amazon-managed AMIs, such as Amazon Linux and Ubuntu, using tools such as the AWS CLI, OpenTofu, Packer, Ansible, and AWS SSM Parameter Store.

How to manage state and environments with OpenTofu

· 18 min read · Comments

Learn about OpenTofu's powerful features for managing state, and how they differ from Terraform, including how to store state, encrypt state, and how to manage state across multiple environments.

How to authenticate to AWS with IAM Identity Center

· 11 min read · Comments

Learn the modern and secure way to authenticate to AWS, both on the web and the command line, using IAM Identity Center.

Learn Git and GitHub in 15 Minutes

· 15 min read · Comments

Learn the basics of Git and GitHub in 15 minutes with this hands-on tutorial. Topics include version control, repositories, branches, commits, merges, pull requests, and more.

News

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Fundamentals of DevOps and Software Delivery has been published!

The final version of Fundamentals of DevOps and Software Delivery has been published and the ebook and print edition are now available online and in your local bookstores! Learn more about why I wrote the book, and why you may want to read it, in this announcement blog post.

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The early release and pre-orders are now available!

The early release is now available at O'Reilly Media! Grab a copy of the ebook before the final version is done so you can start learning today, and receive new chapters and updates as they are written, plus the final ebook bundle when the book is released. If you prefer to wait for the final version, you can preorder the book at online stores now!

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