22 September 2020

650 words 4 mins read

DevOps reports, books and video

DevOps reports, books and video

A collection of excellent resources that are in or adjacent to the DevOps(or devOops) space

State of DevOps Reports

Since the 2011 State of DevOps report they have provided a valuable look at our industry. With great work identifying what correlates highly with good outcomes and what doesn’t. Created by Alanna Brown at Puppet in 2011 and in 2014 it moved over to DORA.

In 2020 it returns to Puppet. They are an excellent review of the industry as a whole and the changes over time.

Posts

Requiring more classification

Books

These books are all awesome.

Narrative style

These 3 books take you through a fictional but all too real organisation trying to change. If you’ve worked in the industry you’ll see people you know throughout them. It’s mildly concerning when you see yourself in the wrong seat (speaking from experience).

2 Books on DevOps transformation projects inside a larger organisation.

The physical factory making widgets implementing a derivative of the Toyota method. It’s a very interesting precursor to the Gene Kim books above.

Themed

These are excellent dives into various topics and imo some of the most useful books around. More technical & analytical than the narrative books above. They each go into a topic and expand on them.

An excellent look at what practices are effective when it comes to reliable releases and value delivery. A great textbook for any organisation wanting to do a “Digital transformation”

Team Topologies looks at how organisations organise software delivery sections and different patterns for them.

A book about software design that is excellent. There really isn’t much to say.

2 books I’m currently reading on “fun” topics. Implementing has a great introduction and excellent content. Monolith also has a great start and more importantly advises you on when not to do the microservice murder mystery. More thoughts as I finish them.

Collections

I think all of these collection style works include some of the best chapters on the topics inside them.

The documentation and testing chapters from the Software Engineering book are brilliant. The Load Balancing and Post Incident Review chapters from the SRE and SRW books are pure gold.

Finally we come to IMO the strongest of this set. Seeking contains chapters of technical wisdom such as the “Database Reliability Engineering” and “Do Docs Better”, Organisational wisdom in the “So you want to build an SRE Team” and “How to Apply SRE Principles Without Dedicated SRE Teams” chapters and then you have “The Intersection of Reliability and Privacy” and “Intersections Between Operations and Social Activism” as capstone chapters.

Videos

Twitter posts

Building GKE Clusters

22 May 2020

Now that we have an environment to run GKE clusters in we should probably build out a few clusters. Thankfully this post shouldn’t be as wordy as the last, but there is still a bunch of stuff to cover. We’re going to go over some of the features of GKE and value.

GCP Folders, Projects and Networks

21 May 2020

To host our GKE clusters, we’ll use several GCP projects. Projects on GCP provide boundaries around access privileges (Identity and Access Management), network constructs like subnets and similar and act as a collection of resources. Our multi-cluster environment is going to need a few projects and some organisation of the base resources in them.

Spinnaker and Multi-Cluster GKE Introduction

20 May 2020

This series is going to cover the work involved and design decisions made to build a multi-cluster, multi-region Google Cloud (GCP) & Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) environment. Once created with Terraform, Spinnaker will be deployed and will manage our Kubernetes workloads from one of the GKE Clusters.