Introduction
It is often advised that one should not judge the book by its cover but it was not the cover that kept me from reading the book, it was the title, 'DevOps Handbook' and frankly I am not a devops guy, as a person who finds docker and Kubernetes very intimidating one can relate to my reluctance.
What got me started was the subtitle of the book 'How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations', as it implies the book focuses more on designing the organization, rather than learning about a specific tool.
Who is this book for?
If you work in a company that works on a particular piece of technology then this book is for you irrespective of your role (Development/QA/Deployment or Operations/Security/Sales).
My Review of the book
The book starts with a brief history of various movements in manufacturing sector namely The Lean Movement, Toyota kata as well as movements in technology sector such as The Agile Manifesto and The Continuous Delivery Movement, and explains how all this resulted in what we call today DevOps.
Further into the book we encounter the concept of value stream, which the book centres around a lot. Value stream especially technology value stream is defined as the process required to convert a business hypothesis into a technology-enabled service that delivers value to the customers. The book explains the various parts of the value stream both in manufacturing sector and relates it with the different phases in technology sector.
DevOps Ideal
The authors consciously use the word ideal and encourage the reader to continually improve our setup/organisation to meet that ideal. Continuous Improvement in DevOps finds it roots back to The Lean Movement significance of which was realised in Toyota Kata.
The Three Ways: The principles of Underpinning DevOps
Finally we learn about the three important ways factoring on which we can define DevOps in practice in an organisation.
The first way enables fast left-to-right flow of work, the flow of work is the technology value stream which starts from Development to Operations and to the customer. In the first way we make our work more visible and constantly optimise our processes down the value stream.
The second way facilitates the fast and constant flow of feedback from right to left at all stages of our value stream. This requires Amplifying the feedbacks to prevent the mistakes from repeating as well as enabling faster detection and recovery.
The third way facilitates the creation of a generative, high-trust culture that supports dynamic disciplined and scientific approach to experimentation as well as risk-taking, overall creating a framework for organisational learning both from success and failure.
In the later part of the book we dive deeper into aforementioned concepts and explore DevOps in practice in various organisation. The authors provide real-life examples of organisations that adopted DevOps and how it improved their organisation as well as the product/service they offer the customer.
I hope this review kindles your interest in the book and encourages you to read it.
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