We're delighted to announce that over the last year we've been hard at work updating the iconic The DevOps Handbook! Originally written over the span of five years, authors Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis created the go-to guide for embarking on a DevOps transformation in any industry. Since the original publication in 2016, the book has gone on to sell more than 250,000 copies and be translated into 11 languages. As the five year anniversary approached, we decided it was … [Read more...]
Common DevOps Myths
Adapted from The DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis. Myth—DevOps is Only for Startups While DevOps practices have been pioneered by the web-scale, Internet “unicorn” companies such as Google, Amazon, Netflix, and Etsy, each of these organizations has, at some point in their history, risked going out of business because of the problems associated with more traditional “horse” organizations: highly dangerous code releases that were prone to catastrophic … [Read more...]
An Imaginary Apology Letter From Your Airline CEO
I spent this morning reflecting on everything I had learned and experienced in the past two days at the London DevOps Enterprise Summit, which I co-hosted. I was so inspired by all the amazing tales of courageous business transformation by the amazing technology leaders representing almost every industry vertical. And then I ran into this article, which I found utterly dismaying. It quoted how Willie Walsh, CEO of International Airlines Group, parent of British Airways, responded to the BA … [Read more...]
Citations from The DevOps Handbook
I wrote previously about some of the statistics about The DevOps Handbook: 5+ years in the making 23 chapters 48 case studies 101,365 words (134,000 with the index) 48 images 509 endnotes 192 footnotes Personally, I have a tremendous sense of satisfaction about the 509 endnotes. In some ways, the citations (in the form of endnotes) show the foundations that the book is built upon, both in the principles, practices, metrics and case studies. Because of the nature of this book, unlike … [Read more...]
The DevOps Handbook | Debunking DevOps Myths
Despite its rise in popularity, there are still a number of fallacies circulating around DevOps. While successful business and IT transformation case studies abound, these myths have unfortunately led some leaders and organizations to believe that DevOps principles and practices are not suitable or relevant to their unique situations. The DevOps Handbook co-authors and DevOps pioneers - Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois and John Willis – have found that companies generally face similar … [Read more...]
CASE STUDY: The Birth of Automated Testing at Google in 2005
The DevOps Handbook (download the free excerpt) is now available. This is one of over 40 case studies you will find in the book. The inside story on the problems the GWS team at Google needed to solve in 2005 that resulted in one of the most admired cultures of automated testing around. By implementing the right principles and patterns, Development and QA are using production-like environments in their daily work, and we are successfully integrating and running our code into a … [Read more...]
CASE STUDY: Etsy, Sprouter and Conway’s Law
The DevOps Handbook is now available. This is one of over 40 case studies you will find in the book. How we organize our teams affects how we perform our work. Dr. Melvin Conway proved this with a famous experiment he performed in 1968 with a contract research organization that had eight people who were commissioned to produce a COBOL and an ALGOL compiler. He observed, “After some initial estimates of difficulty and time, five people were assigned to the COBOL job and three to the ALGOL … [Read more...]
DevOps Handbook Author Highlight Reel
Many of you may already know who Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis are… but even for those who are familiar with their work, you can read more about the history of my relationship with my fellow co-authors on this post. Here are some of my “best of” videos and blog posts for each of them. John Willis One of the many things that John Willis is known for is the State of the Union talks he’s given at many DevOpsDays, having attended over nearly of them since 2009. Here is a ten minute … [Read more...]
The Authors of The DevOps Handbook
An amazing group of co-authors to tackle this topic I have never learned as much during any project than researching and writing The DevOps Handbook. And so much of that learning was from my fellow coauthors. I love the saying, “You’re only as smart as the top five people you hang out with.” Writing a book is like so many things in life, where the outcomes are a function of who our collaborators are. And it seems impossible for me to overstate how much I’ve learned from them. And holy cow, … [Read more...]
