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Cloud costs
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released
January 11, 2022
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3
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The Ever-Growing DevOps Book, Podcast, Blog, Conference, GitHub Repos, and People List

Updated

We love lists. Most people love lists. So, I decided to gather a list of books, podcasts, blogs, conferences, GitHub repos, and people everyone should follow in the DevOps space. This blog will get Continuous Updates (see what I did there?), so bookmark it and come hang out once in a while. 

If you’d like to be added to the DevOps List, shoot me an email and I’ll check you out!

Most of the books will be Amazon links - to clarify, we are *not* using affiliate links or receiving payment from links. When possible, we’ll link to the author’s site directly to purchase books. 

DevOps Books

DevOps Books to Read

The OG Starter Pack: 

The DevOps Handbook, written by the founders of DevOps, is obviously a must-read. In what world would it not make the DevOps List?!

Continuous Delivery by Dave Farley is a must for anyone starting out in CI/CD. He’s the man, the myth, the CD legend. He also has a cool YouTube channel that’s regularly updated. Also, the book makes a great gift, as my partner would confirm! 

Accelerate, by Nicole Forsgren and company, is a great primer into the four core DevOps metrics to track (MTTR, Lead Time, Deployment Frequency, Change Failure Rate), and why they’re important. Here’s a 90-page excerpt if you want to try before you buy.

The SRE Book by Google is a given as well. It’s conveniently available in full online, but if you really want to spend the money, you can get a physical copy

More Books!

Implementing Service Level Objectives: A Practical Guide to SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets by Alex Hidalgo. Alex worked at Google, helped write the SRE book, has presented at a ton of conferences - all this to say, he’s legit and the book is worth a read. 

Effective DevOps - This book has a strong focus on the culture of DevOps - ie, it’s not just a set of tools and practices, it’s a culture based on trust and collaboration that needs to be embraced fully to be done correctly. 

The Phoenix Project & The Unicorn Project - Similar books from the same author but with a different story. Phoenix is from an ops perspective, and Unicorn is from a dev perspective. Each book describes the value that each team gets from adopting DevOps practices. 

DevOps Podcasts

DevOps Podcasts to Listen to

O11ycast - The Observability podcast. With observability and monitoring being such an integral part of DevOps, it’s no surprise that we’re adding this podcast to our recommendations lists. It’s headed by three amazing women from Honeycomb.io - we’re huge fans!

The Women of DevOps - Yeah, yeah, shameless plug. I started this podcast here at Harness, and it’s growing at a steady pace. I’ve interviewed women with great stories about how they came into DevOps from fields such as psychology, biochemistry, and historical preservation. 

Docker and DevOps - Long form podcast that covers a wide variety of topics around cloud native, Kubernetes, Docker, and adjacent tooling. We have avid listeners at Harness that can’t get enough of this podcast. 

Break Things on Purpose - Our friends at Gremlin put out a podcast on chaos engineering, so if you’re looking to enhance your practice, this is a great resource.

DevOps Blogs

DevOps Blogs to Follow

We’ll be linking to IC blogs, not companies. Of course blogs sites like DevOps.com, DZone, TNS, etc are great, but let’s highlight people.

Ben Sigelman - His Twitter-threads-as-blog-posts Medium account is pretty interesting! 

iHeavy.com - Sean Hull’s personal blog on DevOps. He writes easily digestible posts that are educational. 

Matduggan.com - DevOps engineers with a supremely popular ‘crash course’ on DevOps. He writes long, informative posts on his experiences. My personal favorite is Mistakes

Thomas Thornton - Specific to Azure as that’s where Thomas’ expertise is, but could be very useful for readers on the Azure cloud. Lots of super helpful step-by-step tutorials with code blocks and screenshots.

DevOps Conferences

DevOps Conferences to Attend

We’re gonna skip the obvious ones like Re:Invent/KubeCon in the DevOps List. Not to say you shouldn’t go, they’re good places to make connections and learn - but we’re trying to introduce you to lesser-known stuff here!

DevOpsDays - Having been to DevOpsDays Tampa, I can confirm this conference is chock-full of good info on all topics relating to - or adjacent to - DevOps. This is an international conference, so chances are there’s a conference near you, no matter where you are. 

SREcon - They’ve had some pretty big keynote speakers in the space. Folks from Google, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, etc. Alex Hidalgo, mentioned above, has spoken as well. And I have it on good authority that a Women of DevOps guest is speaking at SREcon22! 

DevOpsCon - For our friends across the pond, this one looks fun! 2022 dates are announced, and topics touch just about every area of DevOps. Want to attend, but not in London? They have a virtual version as well. 

DevOps Connect: DevSecOps - Part of the RSA conference, so you do need a pass to the larger conference, but the price tag doesn’t invoke sticker shock: a $50 pass should do to attend this. 

The DEVOPS Conference - When DevOps is in ALL CAPS, you know it’s good :D Happens in March this year, still fully virtual! Patrick Debois will be there, and they have a ton of speakers already announced. 

DockerCon - Fully-virtual conference happening in May, obviously centered around all things Docker. Expect technical deep dives, demos, and Docker experts galore. Best of all? It’s FREE!

All Day DevOps - Literally 24hrs of nonstop DevOps talks. They had speakers/presenters from CloudBees, IBM, VikingOps, Honeycomb, and more, in 2021. 2022 hasn’t been announced yet, but all the talks from last year are available on demand. 

{unscripted} - Another shameless plug, but this is our conference - born out of the pandemic, it’s been fully virtual and will most likely stay that way, but we’ve had interesting speakers like Dave Farley!

GitHub Repos

GitHub Repos to Check Out

How They SRE - A curated collection of publicly available resources on how technology and tech-savvy organizations around the world practice Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).

Public APIs - A collective list of free APIs.

Build Your Own X - Massive collection of tutorials (etc.) on how to create just about anything tech-related. 

Gothinkster - Exemplary full stack Medium.com clone powered by React, Angular, Node, Django, and many more.

Awesome Cheatsheets - Cheatsheets for popular programming languages, frameworks, and development tools. They include everything you should know in one single file.

People to Follow

DevOps (and Adjacent) People to Follow

Ian Coldwater - Because they are amazing and hilarious. They’re in DevSecOps. They’ve presented at a ton of conferences, are an ethical hacker, etc. One of their slide decks is up on the interwebs (Ship of Fools) and I chuckled my way through the slides. Worth a follow!

Jon Gjengset - PhD student at MIT, does a lot of live coding streams on Rust. He’s a great resource for advanced users. Plus he has a cat that sometimes makes it in the videos. :D

Bryan Liles - Principal Engineer at VMWare. Former CNCF co-chair. Speaker at numerous conferences. Topics include cloud native, Kubernetes, etc.

Janna Dogan - Principal Engineer at AWS. Ex-Google. Opinions on all things tech and cloud native.

Corey Quinn - Funny and interesting. Speaks and snarks about AWS and AWS billing in specific.  

Kelsey Hightower - Principal Engineer at Google, thought leader on all things Cloud and Kubernetes. Has spoken at numerous conferences and co-founded KubeCon. Helped bring K8s where it is. Top ambassador at the CNCF.

Angie Jones - VP of developer relations at Block. Thought leader in testing and test automation. Keynote speaker at a long list of conferences.

Liz Rice - CNCF Chair, KubeCon chair, talks about container security and cloud native.

Martin Fowler - Self-described “loud mouth on Software Development” - personal website here!

Jez Humble - If you’re into DevOps, ya kinda have to follow Jez. It’s in the rules somewhere. 

Computerphile - A recommendation from my partner who has been watching Computerphile videos for yeaaaaars. He touches on areas of DevOps and broader IT.

Emily Freeman - Formerly Microsoft, now AWS. Author of DevOps for Dummies. Haven’t read it myself but from what readers have told me, it’s worth a read. Follow her for funny and insightful tweets. 

Stephen Augustus - Cloud-native, open-source, hilarious - what more do you want?! Anime references?! Yeah, he has that too!

Bridget Kromhout - If you’re a fan of Azure, cloud-native, open-source, DevOpsDays, and cute cats, look no further! Bridget posts and retweets insightful stuff. She has also cemented that I never want to go to Minnesota. -16 degrees? No thank youuuu.

No, I Didn’t Do This Alone

Definitely could not have written this exhaustive list without the help of a few kind souls. After writing down all the ones I could think about, I reached out to a couple communities for their suggestions. Suncoast Developers Guild, y’all are the best. Harness community, y’all are also the best. :D Thanks for the recommendations!

Special thanks to: Andrew Jones, Marcus Bastian, Chris Storz, Bhargav Brahmbhatt, Jim Hirschauer, Pavan Belagatti, and Dave Nielsen.

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