Jake PageTL;DR 🤓
DevOps and cloud engineers need not have a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf full of books to enhance their skills. A few key books are all you need (at least at the beginning). Below I highlight key titles for both junior and senior DevOps and cloud engineers, focusing on improving productivity, understanding cloud native technologies and cloud infrastructure. Emphasizing practical application and continuous learning is essential for advancing a career in the rapidly evolving cloud industry.
With the vast amount of valuable and entertaining sources of Cloud Engineering information, from podcasts and YouTube channels to even movies, it can sometimes make us question the authenticity of the well-stocked bookshelves we see behind team members on our daily Zoom calls. Do they actually read those books, or are they just for show?
As someone who has always loved books for their content and entertainment value, I've found myself increasingly drawn to them in recent years for the change of mental pace they provide compared to other modern content mediums.
Unlike other technical book recommendation articles, I want to distinguish between four distinct categories of books that I find helpful to keep in mind. Not every book on this list is meant to be read from cover to cover, nor is every book a dense technical textbook that will gather dust on your shelf after a quick leaf-through.
The handful of book recommendations that have made an impact on my own cloud journey fall into the following categories:
Core concepts: 🏗️
- Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture
- The DevOps Handbook
- Cloud Native Infrastructure
Reference books: 🔎
- Site Reliability Engineering
- AWS Fundamentals
Page turners: 📑
- The Phoenix Project
- Accelerate
Not cloud specific but still must reads:📍
- Wiring the winning organisation
- Slow productivity
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications
🚨 Disclaimer: Gene Kim is going to feature prominently on this list
Before we begin
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Core concepts 🏗️
These are the types of books that provide beginners with essential core concepts and frameworks, forming a solid foundation that helps future lessons fall right into place.
1. Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture
Synopsis:
Originally published in 2013, this book is respected industry wide and is a comprehensive guide to cloud computing by exploring its history, models, mechanisms, architectures, and security considerations. Combining case studies with technical analysis, the book examines topics ranging from cloud-enabling technologies to cloud service level agreements.
What you will learn:
- You will get a comprehensive and vendor-neutral understanding of cloud technologies, making it easier to assess various cloud solutions and providers objectively.
- Fundamental cloud computing concepts, models, and mechanisms.
- A deeper understanding of cloud characteristics, security threats, and risk management frameworks, crucial for designing secure and reliable cloud solutions.
Quote from the book:
"There is no greater danger to a business than approaching cloud computing adoption with ignorance. The magnitude of a failed adoption effort not only correspondingly impacts IT departments, but can actually regress a business to a point where it finds itself steps behind from where it was prior to the adoption—and, perhaps, even more steps behind competitors that have been successful at achieving their goals in the meantime."
A review that caught my eye:
Get it here.
2. The DevOps Handbook
Synopsis:
By presenting the “Three ways” as the principles for mitigating these challenges and achieving world-class performance, the book illustrates how organizations can adopt DevOps principles and practices to accelerate delivery, improve reliability, and create a more satisfying and productive work environment.
What you will learn:
- The Three Ways (Flow, Feedback & Continual Learning and Experimentation).
- Focus on Deployment Lead Time.
- Conway’s law.
Quote from the book:
"DevOps isn't about automation, just as astronomy isn't about telescopes."
A review that caught my eye:
Get it here.
3. Cloud Native Infrastructure
Synopsis:
The authors explain key concepts like representing infrastructure through code, APIs, managing application life cycles in a cloud-native way, and ensuring security and compliance, but overall the book stresses that cloud native infrastructure is about adapting principles and processes more than specific technologies, impacting application management as much as hardware.
It guides readers on when and why to adopt these practices, outlining how they differ from traditional approaches.
What you will learn:
- Cloud native infrastructure prioritizes building infrastructure with software over manual configuration.
- Resiliency is paramount in cloud native infrastructure.
- Cloud native infrastructure necessitates a shift in mindset and company culture.
- Embracing chaos and designing for failure are essential.
Quote from the book:
"The only systems that should never fail are those that keep you alive (e.g., heart implants, and brakes)".
A review that caught my eye:
Get it here.
Reference books 🔎
Keep these books close by, preferably within arm's reach. In truth, the "Core Concepts" books could also fall into this category and vice versa. As you build your personal home library, you'll definitely want hard copies of these books. This way, you can reference them easily, make annotations, earmark important sections, and fully extract the valuable insights they offer.
4. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
Synopsis:
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), a discipline pioneered by Google, offers a distinct approach to managing large-scale software systems by emphasizing the application of software engineering principles to operations. The book explores this approach in detail, providing insights into Google's production environment, SRE principles such as embracing risk and eliminating toil, and practical practices including monitoring, incident response, and capacity planning.
It emphasizes the importance of automation, simplicity in software design, and a blameless postmortem culture for continuous improvement.
What you will learn:
- The core principles and practices of Site Reliability Engineering.
- Gain insights into Google's production environment and the challenges of running large-scale systems.
- How to apply SRE principles to their own organizations, regardless of size or technical expertise.
Quote from the book:
"If a human operator needs to touch your system during normal operations, you have a bug. The definition of normal changes as your systems grow."
A review that caught my eye:
Get it here.
5. AWS Fundamentals
Synopsis:
"AWS Fundamentals" guides readers through the essentials of Amazon Web Services (AWS), emphasizing practical application over certification preparation. It provides a comprehensive overview of core AWS services like EC2, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, Lambda, and more, categorized by function (compute, database and storage, messaging, etc.
The authors offer practical examples, use cases, configuration recommendations, and tips for each service. Additionally, the book introduces Infrastructure as Code (IaC), explaining its importance and demonstrating how to use frameworks like CloudFormation, Serverless, and CDK to provision infrastructure.
What you will learn:
- Understanding the core building blocks of AWS (a lot of core cloud concepts are valid for over cloud providers).
- Learning how to apply AWS knowledge in real-world scenarios.
- Gaining an understanding of Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
Quote from the book:
“Learning AWS doesn’t need to be hard. It is important to focus on the basics and to understand them well. Once this is done all new services or features can be understood really well.”
A review that caught my eye:
Get it here.
Page turners 📑
Apart from teaching valuable professional lessons these books have felt as entertaining as other non technical works of fiction or non-fiction. All three left me with a strong “I need you to read this“ feeling.
6. The Phoenix project
Synopsis:
A novel (yes an actual novel) that follows Bill Palmer, a VP of IT Operations at Parts Unlimited, who is tasked with salvaging the company's failing IT project, code-named "Phoenix." As Bill navigates the challenges of a stressful work environment full of miscommunication, finger-pointing, and a looming audit, he crosses paths with Erik, a board member who introduces him to the principles of DevOps, without calling it that.
Throughout the story, Bill and his team work to implement these principles, striving to streamline their workflow and improve collaboration between Development and IT Operations. The book is special since the conceptual thrust of the book of spreading DevOps practices is delivered in the refreshing form of a fully fledged narrative novel.
What you will learn:
- The three ways is also touched upon in this book (similar to the DevOps Handbook).
- The importance of identifying and managing constraints to optimize the flow of work.
- The importance of collaboration and communication between Development, IT Operations, and the business as a whole.
Quote from the book:
“Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system.”
A review that caught my eye:
Get it here.
7. Accelerate
Synopsis:
The book presents four years of research exploring the practices that contribute to high-performing technology organizations. The authors sought to identify the capabilities that drive software delivery performance and, in turn, impact organizational performance. Their findings highlight twenty-four key capabilities, categorized as continuous delivery, architecture, product and process, lean management and monitoring, and cultural, that demonstrably improve software delivery and overall business outcomes.
The book emphasizes that these capabilities are measurable and improvable, offering guidance for organizations to assess their current state and embark on a journey of continuous improvement.
What you will learn:
- Software delivery performance is a key predictor of organizational performance
- A set of capabilities, including technical practices, Lean management, and a generative culture, drive improvements in software delivery performance.
- Transformational leadership is crucial in enabling and amplifying the adoption of these capabilities.
Quote from the book:
"The most important characteristic of high-performing teams is that they are never satisfied: they always strive to get better."
A review that caught my eye:
Get it here.
Not cloud specific but still must reads📍
Not specifically cloud related at all but these are book that for different reasons I feel can round out a cloud engineer.
8. Wiring the Winning Organization
I'm a huge fan of reading "leadership" or "management" focused books, even though I'm not in either of those positions. Learning what leadership should care about and the key ingredients needed to achieve excellent results serves as a cheat sheet for any individual contributor wanting to stand out by being impactful. Change doesn’t always have to come from the top, you can push it from wherever you find yourself.
Synopsis:
The book presents a new theory of performance management, emphasizing how leaders can create the conditions for their organizations to achieve exceptional results. The book introduces three key mechanisms for building a "winning organization": slowification (making problem-solving easier), simplification (making problems easier to solve), and amplification (making problems more visible).
Through a combination of theoretical explanations, practical case studies, and real-world examples, the authors demonstrate how these mechanisms can be applied across diverse industries and organizational contexts to achieve superior performance.
What you will learn:
- Greatness in any endeavor is achievable through a focus on refining the "social circuitry" of an organization.
- Three key mechanisms slowification, simplification, and amplification can be employed to move an organization from a "danger zone" to a "winning zone".
- Leaders who embrace these mechanisms can create organizations that achieve extraordinary results.
Quote from the book:
“Slowification enables the shift from reactive, "fast thinking" based on ingrained habits to more effective "slow thinking" that allows for deliberation, reflection, and creativity in problem-solving.“
A review that caught my eye:
Get it here.
9. Slow productivity
Synopsis:
Slow Productivity by Cal Newport challenges the modern obsession with visible busyness as a measure of productivity, what he terms pseudo-productivity. Instead, the book champions a slow productivity philosophy based on three core principles: doing fewer things, working at a natural pace, and obsessing over quality.
This philosophy argues that by intentionally limiting workloads, embracing a sustainable work pace, and prioritizing quality over quantity, knowledge workers can achieve greater meaning and produce superior results.
The book explores the theoretical underpinnings of these principles and offers practical strategies for implementing them in various professional settings.
What you will learn:
- To do less
- Work at the more natural pace
- Obsess over quality
Quote from the book:
"for all of our complaining about the term, knowledge workers have no agreed-upon definition of what “productivity” even means."
A review that caught my eye:
Get it here.
10. Designing Data-Intensive Applications
As cloud engineers, we collaborate closely with the developers in our organization who write the applications we deploy and maintain. While this book doesn’t provide directly actionable knowledge for our day-to-day tasks, it has given me a deeper understanding of the concepts underpinning the creation of our organization’s apps. More importantly, it has provided me with a common language to effectively communicate with the developers on my team.
Synopsis:
Designing Data-Intensive Applications, by Martin Kleppmann, explores the fundamental principles and practical considerations for building reliable, scalable, and maintainable data systems. The book examines various data models, including relational, document, and graph-based models, and their respective query languages, analyzing their suitability for different applications.
It also examines storage engines, data encoding formats, and schema evolution. A key focus is the exploration of distributed data systems, including replication, partitioning (sharding), and the challenges of maintaining consistency and consensus in such environments. The book uses real-world examples of successful data systems to illustrate key concepts and trade-offs.
What you will learn:
- Various data models, including relational, document, and graph-based models, and their respective query languages, analyzing their suitability for different applications.
- Storage engines and how databases arrange data on disk to find it again efficiently
- Reliability, scalability, and maintainability.
Quote from the book:
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
A review that caught my eye:
Get it here.
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