Learning DevOps

The Agile Admins learned DevOps from our long work in the trenches of tech. We share a passion for making it more accessible to all, which is what spurred publishing our definition of DevOps in the first place and our work making LinkedIn Learning courses. As a result, we’ve gathered here all the best resources that we’ve personally used (or made) in hopes that it can help you along your career!

Agile Admin LinkedIn Learning Courses

These are courses we’ve made to help orient learners in the pretty wide-ranging world of DevOps!

DevOps 101

DevOps 200-level

DevOps 300-level

DevOps 400-level

DevSecOps

Cloud Native

Observability

Books We Love

There’s been an increasing number of solid books that have helped us learn about various aspects of DevOps – we have read and recommend everything on this list.

  • The DevOps Handbook, Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, John Willis, John Allspaw, and Jez Humble, came out in late 2016 and is finally a definitive source on DevOps.  It’s full of techniques and case studies.
  • The Phoenix Project, Gene Kim, George Spafford, Kevin Behr – In novel format inspired by the seminal Lean work The Goal, this is a narrative of a DevOps implementation in a troubled software company.
  • Web Operations, various – An O’Reilly book collecting a series of essays on Web operations that are really thoughts from a lot of the key DevOps pioneers.
  • Continuous Delivery, Jez Humble and David Farley – While CI/CD isn’t the sum total of DevOps like some people would have it, it’s certainly a major area of innovation and this is the definitive work on it.
  • A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development, Gary Gruver – For those who think DevOps is just for startups or just for Web software, this is the tale of how the HP LaserJet firmware division transitioned to an agile/CI/DevOps structure.
  • The Practice of Cloud System Administration, Tom Limoncelli, Strata Chalup, Christina Hogan – A textbook style guide from the operations side, with loads of great new-style systems guidance and a lot of explicit DevOps content.
  • Release It!, Michael Nygard – There needs to be more books like this, it explains common systems failure patterns and success patterns – I think of it as the Gang of Four Design Patterns book for systems.
  • Lean Software Development, Mary and Tom Poppendieck – Lean is being increasingly adopted within the DevOps community, but starting from Deming and TPS is somewhat intimidating.  This book is the seminal work on Lean in software.

Other Resources

In its early days, learning DevOps was an exercise in following blogs and going to events! Blogs faded out for a while, got somewhat replaced by Twitter, then there were some podcasts, then newsletters caught on… Online resources are more fragmented than ever, but here’s ones that we currently use and enjoy.