8 Great DevOps Resources

#devops #career #learning #beginners

The future of DevOps solutions is bright. The global DevOps market size is expected to increase from $2.90 billion in 2017 to $10.31 billion by 2023, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 24.7% during the forecast period.

The growing need for fast app delivery is driving the market growth, with organizations that want to achieve both speed and quality.

However, the world is facing a shortage of DevOps skills. That’s why DevOps engineers are highly-paid, with Glassdoor estimating the average annual pay at around $100,000.

So, if you’re looking for a career switch or upgrade, learning DevOps is a good idea. From books to podcasts, here are the best DevOps resources to start with:

The Phoenix Project

Who would have thought you could write a novel about DevOps? Well, Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford obviously did a great job!

The Phoenix Project is an amazing novel about DevOps. The story revolves around a fictional company called “Parts Unlimited”, where the IT manager gets promoted into a senior position. Then, he gets a deadline of 90 days to repair “The Phoenix Project”, a failing and messy code project that’s crucial to the future of the company. If he fails, the CEO threatens to outsource the entire IT department and let go of the people working in it.

So, he starts working on it with the help of some board members. The most important thing here is his philosophy called The Three Ways. It consists of (obviously) three parts—maximizing the flow of work from left-to-right, starting from business to development to IT operations to the end-user; increasing the feedback loop from right to left, and developing and nurturing a culture of continuous deployment and learning.

This philosophy helps him create a streamlined workflow in the department, improve communication and effectiveness, and make the IT department really valuable to the company.

I think this is a really great book, especially for beginners. It gives a sense of what problems IT departments face every day, and offers realistic solutions.

Infrastructure as Code

Coming from ThoughtWorks, this is another book that focuses on the entire DevOps movement from a more technical aspect. This book covers the principles of Infrastructure as Code, practical examples, dynamic infrastructure platforms, various cloud options, tools, patterns, software engineering practices, creation and management of pipelines, workflows, and infrastructure management. They are all divided into three sections—Foundations, Patterns, and Practices.

If you’re interested in similar books, you can check Evolutionary Architecture and Building Microservices, also by ThoughtWorks.

DevOps Essentials

This Udemy course has hosted over 40,000 students who gave an average rating of 4.4/5. The course is completely free, covering 2 hours and 15 minutes of video lessons.

This course can give you an understanding of how DevOps impacts the IT world. You’ll learn the basic DevOps terminology, the evolution of DevOps, the most important processes, the most common tools used, and the most popular DevOps and cloud providers.

Docker and Kubernetes: The Complete Guide

Another Udemy course with over 120,000 students enrolled and an average rating of 4.6. During 21.5 hours of video materials, you’ll learn everything you need to know about Docker and Kubernetes, even if you don’t have previous experience with these topics.

The course starts with a deep dive into the Docker world, showing you all the Docker fundamentals. Then, you’ll learn everything you need to know about setting up a CI/CD pipeline and implementing it on Github and AWS.

Then, you’ll learn to construct a multi-container application utilizing Node, React, Redis, and Postgres. After this, you should be able to deploy both single- and multi-container applications on AWS.

Finally, you’ll learn how to build a Kubernetes Cluster. This course even covers setting up HTTPS on Kubernetes.

In their reviews, students say how they loved the way the teacher explains all concepts step-by-step. All in all, it’s one of the best courses on Udemy.

Learn DevOps: Continuously Deliver Better Software

One of the most detailed courses about DevOps that targets more experienced engineers, System Administrators, IT managers, IT operation members, and other IT professionals.

The lecturer explains how to improve software delivery with automation, configuration management, provisioning, and deployment. Docker and Kubernetes are also covered.

Although the course lasts about 4.5 hours, you can add much more by trying everything by yourself. The lecturer even offers support for people who get stuck. Students also have a Facebook group where they post questions and discuss.

The Netflix Tech Blog

The Netflix Tech Blog is a great place where you can find out “how they build code at Netflix.” Developers share literally everything, going beyond DevOps. Here, you’ll learn how Netflix creates, builds, and manages its system and engineering organizations.

For example, in one of their blogs, they elaborated on how they applied Netflix DevOps patterns to Windows, while another one is about their hexagonal architecture.

DevOps SubReddit

Although it’s not a mainstream source, the DevOps SubReddit has many interesting and useful information software engineers should check out. Here, you’ll find a lot of blog posts, articles, and news about DevOps.

Most importantly, you can engage in discussions with fellow DevOps enthusiasts and learn a lot from their knowledge and experience, sharing a lot of practical examples.

Podcast: Arrested DevOps

Arrested DevOps is a podcast hosted by Joe Laha, Bridget Kromhout, Matt Stratton, Trever Hess, and Jessica Kerr. They’ve recorded over 130 episodes, with the goal to help developers evolve practices and manage teams that will help them take the maximum out of DevOps.

Listeners can learn more about DevOps strategies, best tools, and integrations from delightful guest speakers that come from different parts of the world. The episodes last about 40-45 minutes and are released on a monthly basis.

Here are some other links with DevOps resources you might find useful:

If you have some more interesting and useful resources where you learn DevOps, please share them in the comments :)

Top comments (5)

Vinay Hegde • May 14 '20 • Edited

Excellent post with a lot of resources Sara, bookmarking for future reference!!

On a personal note, I believe DevOps is more of a practice that should be followed by engineering teams across any organization with an emphasis on traits like: