Embracing the DevOps approach involves continuously improving your systems. You can only do that by continuously improving your knowledge and experience of this ever-evolving development and operations model.
Also, as organizations seek indispensable DevOps expertise, you’d do well to sharpen your skills continually.
Whether you’re a CTO or a junior developer, a systems administrator, or just joining a new company, we’ve compiled this list of must-read DevOps books for you. The books cover several important categories, including:
Introduction To DevOps Books
These DevOps books will help you better understand DevOps, why it matters, and how to get started.
1. Beyond the Phoenix Project: The Origins and Evolution of DevOps
Authors: Gene Kim and John Willis
Year: February 2018
Gene Kim, an award-winning CTO and researcher, and John Willis, an evangelist at Docker Inc., share their foundational knowledge of DevOps here. In Beyond the Phoenix Project, you can read about the pivotal figures, philosophies, and Learning Organization concepts that differentiate the DevOps approach from other IT methodologies.
2. The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
Authors: Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis
Year: November 2021 (2nd Edition)
This influential must-read is ideal for everyone in DevOps, from developers and operations teams to IT managers and platform owners. In this new edition, you’ll learn about 15 case studies of companies that have realized the benefits of DevOps (including Adidas, Fannie Mae, and the US Air Force) and best practices to help you implement it in your organization. You’ll learn about rapid feedback and flow, DevOps KPIs and metrics to measure, value stream mapping, and understanding your CI/CD pipeline.
3. The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
Authors: Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford
Year: January 2013
This classic takes an unconventional story approach to explore the core principles of DevOps and how they look and work in real life. The story follows Bill, VP of IT at Parts Unlimited. Bill and his team are well over budget and time with their new IT initiative, the Phoenix Project — although the system remains unusable. They have 90 days to fix the mess, or their entire department will be outsourced. During this timeline, Bill and his team present the reader with various challenges, DevOps use cases, and best practices for adopting and optimizing a DevOps culture.
4. The DevOps Adoption Playbook: A Guide to Adopting DevOps in a Multi-Speed IT Enterprise
Author: Sanjeev Sharma
Year: February 2017
In this DevOps 2017 Book of the Year, you will discover how to experiment and apply DevOps best practices at the enterprise level. Using his experience leading IBM’s DevOps practice, Sanjeev Sharma shares actionable advice. He acknowledges the risks, limitations, opportunities, and challenges of implementing DevOps in large organizations, then discusses cultural, tooling, organizational, and other changes you can make immediately to improve your engineering innovation velocity.
5. The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction
Author: William Shotts
Year: 2009 (New Edition in March 2019)
The Linux Command Line presents practical knowledge in short and sweet chapters, describing how to use the most popular operating system for DevOps engineers: Linux. This book teaches you how to automate repetitive tasks using shell scripts, write programs in Bash, edit files with Vi, and more. It also covers creating, deleting, and cleaning directories, symlinks, and files. Combine this read with Evi Nemeth’s UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (Fifth Edition).
Research Report
FinOps In The AI Era: A Critical Recalibration
What 475 executives told us about AI and cloud efficiency.
Books On DevOps Culture
6. Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs
Author: John Doerr
Year: April 2018
Before he became the legendary venture capitalist he is today, John Doerr was an engineer at Intel in the 1970s. While there, he worked under the legendary Andy Grove, learning the art and science of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). The book shares case studies of how the system has worked at bleeding-edge IT companies like Google and Microsoft so you can see its practical application.
7. Turn the Ship Around: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders
Author: L. David Marquet
Year: May 2013
A key characteristic of DevOps is its emphasis on sharing responsibilities while preventing silos from forming. Turn the Ship Around is a story-based guide to delegating, mentoring, and leading flawless operations while boosting team morale, performance, and talent retention.
8. DevOps for the Modern Enterprise: Winning Practices to Transform Legacy IT Organizations
Author: Mirco Hering
Year: April 2018
While many DevOps books focus on the right tooling and methods, Mirco’s guide emphasizes the people aspect of maintaining high-performing IT systems. He insists that cultural change is the most impactful initiative yet the toughest to implement. The perfect read for companies eager to transform their cultures from legacy to bleeding-edge.
9. Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale
Authors: Gary Gruver and Tommy Mouser
Year: August 2015
Leading the Transformation provides the execution plan your leadership needs to create, implement, and track the progress of your modern DevOps framework across teams and departments. The book emphasizes how to coordinate work across various players — including the culture to support this transformation.
10. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Authors: Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox
Year: June 2014 (30th Anniversary Edition)
Engineers and leaders who want to break out of traditional thinking and adopt working techniques in a rapidly changing world will find this 30th Edition of the 1984 classic compulsive reading. Engineers will recognize real-life struggles in the thriller-style narrative and glean insights into how to turn failing initiatives into thriving operations, one day at a time.
Technical DevOps Books
11. The Unicorn Project: A Novel About Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data
Author: Gene Kim
Year: November 2019
As in The Phoenix Project, Gene Kim uses a narrative style to show how you can overcome traditional bureaucracy and endless meetings to develop and deliver better solutions. In The Unicorn Project, Maxine, a former Phoenix Project developer, learns to overcome legacy structures and red tape with another team using DevOps best practices.
12. Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale
Author: Jennifer Davis
Year: July 2016
Jennifer Davis debunks the myth that DevOps involves introducing many new tools and specialists. Instead, she and contributor Ryan Daniels share several practical ways to improve collaboration between individuals and entire teams, use DevOps tooling efficiently, and leverage what works in one area across the organization. The book explains four pillars of effective DevOps, several well-researched case studies, and how to troubleshoot common issues within your team.
13. Production-Ready Microservices: Building Standardized Systems Across an Engineering Organization
Author: Susan J. Fowler
Year: December 2016
Using her experience standardizing microservices at Uber, Susan Fowler shares five standards to gauge the production-readiness status of your microservices initiative. It is an in-depth read that guides you through designing, building, and deploying fault-tolerant and performant microservices.
14. Practical DevOps: Harness the Power of DevOps to Boost Your Skill Set
Author: Joakim Verona
Year: February 2016 (2nd Edition May 2018)
You’ll take a journey through the chapters of this book by creating a Java application and continually improving it. The aim is to enable you to learn how to use essential DevOps tools like Jenkins, Puppet, Git, GitLab, Selenium, Chef, Vagrant, and others in your daily workflow.
15. Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes: Building, Deploying, and Scaling Modern Applications in the Cloud
Authors: John Arundel and Justin Domingus
Year: April 2019 (2nd Edition)
Read it to learn about the rapidly evolving Kubernetes environment and how to use it to solve everyday problems. This book walks you through a model containerized application running in K8s, from development to the CI/CD pipeline. You’ll walk away with models you can apply directly to your own use cases.
16. Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems (2nd Edition)
Author: Sam Newman
Year: August 2021 (2nd Edition)
The updated second edition reflects the significant changes in microservices since the original 2015 publication. Sam Newman provides practical insights and many examples on designing, modeling, integrating, testing, deploying, and monitoring autonomous services — now updated with coverage of serverless, containers, and the latest patterns for microservices communication and data management.
17. Observability Engineering: Achieving Production Excellence
Authors: Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones, and George Miranda
Year: May 2022
Observability Engineering makes the case that traditional monitoring — dashboards, alerts, and pre-defined metrics — is insufficient for understanding complex distributed systems. The authors (from Honeycomb) explain how to instrument systems for observability, use structured events and high-cardinality data to debug production issues, and build a culture where engineers can ask arbitrary questions of their running systems without shipping new code.
Platform Engineering And Team Design
How you organize your engineering teams shapes the software they produce. These books address the organizational side of DevOps — how team structures, platform thinking, and cognitive load management directly determine whether your DevOps practices succeed or stall.
18. Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
Authors: Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
Year: September 2019
Team Topologies has become one of the most influential books in the DevOps ecosystem since its publication. It introduces four fundamental team types (stream-aligned, enabling, complicated subsystem, and platform) and three interaction modes that together provide a practical model for organizing engineering organizations. The book argues that Conway’s Law isn’t just an observation — it’s a design tool. Essential reading for anyone involved in engineering org design, platform engineering, or DevOps transformation.
19. Platform Engineering on Kubernetes
Author: Mauricio Salatino
Year: 2024
Platform Engineering on Kubernetes bridges the gap between the team design principles in Team Topologies and the practical implementation of internal developer platforms. It walks through building a platform on Kubernetes that reduces cognitive load for development teams — covering service pipelines, environment management, API abstractions, and the developer experience layer that sits between raw infrastructure and application teams.
Books About DevOps Security
20. Securing DevOps: Security in the Cloud
Author: Julien Vehent
Year: August 2018
Read Securing DevOps if you seek a practical manual detailing how to build, mature, and continuously improve security throughout the DevOps lifecycle. The book deploys case studies and shares examples of securing everything from the infrastructure to communications between your services, deterring fraud attempts, and securing operations at scale.
21. Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems
Authors: Heather Adkins, Betsy Beyer, Paul Blankinship, Piotr Lewandowski, Ana Oprea, Adam Stubblefield
Year: March 2020
Written by Google engineers, this book shares proven methods for designing secure, reliable systems. It focuses on building defenses, managing incidents, and fostering teamwork. Essential for any DevOps or SRE professional who wants to avoid failures and breaches while maintaining high performance.
Site Reliability Engineering Books
22. Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
Editors: Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Murphy
Year: May 2016
Google engineers pioneered Site Reliability Engineering, a concept essential to maintaining high availability and optimal performance and meeting customer Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In this guide, you will find a collection of essays explaining how Google develops large-scale, reliable, and efficient systems so you can apply them to your own operations. The Site Reliability Workbook (August 2018), which further explains SRE from the perspective of Google engineers, is also available.
23. Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time
Authors: Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright
Year: March 2020
Software Engineering at Google distills decades of engineering practices from one of the world’s largest codebases. It covers how Google approaches code review, testing, documentation, dependency management, and large-scale changes — all through the lens of sustainability over time. For DevOps and SRE practitioners, the chapters on continuous integration, deployment, and managing a monorepo at scale are particularly relevant.
24. Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale
Author: David N. Blank-Edelman
Year: August 2018
This collection of essays explores diverse perspectives on implementing SRE across various organizations. It delves into the relationship between SRE and DevOps, emerging specialties, and best practices. It also touches on the human aspects of maintaining reliable systems at scale.
25. Next Gen DevOps: A Manager’s Guide to DevOps and SRE
Author: Grant Smith
Year: September 2019
This book provides a handy guide for IT leaders to learn how to seamlessly combine DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). The author shares real-life lessons from working in multiple technology enterprises and startups. You’ll gain insights into delivering robust online services by leveraging data-driven development, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), and automated testing.
26. Cloud-Native Patterns: Designing Change-Tolerant Software
Author: Cornelia Davis
Year: May 2019
This book teaches you how to build and maintain cloud-native systems that can handle massive amounts of traffic and treasure troves of data without breaking or costing you a fortune.
Infrastructure As Code Books
Infrastructure as Code has become a foundational DevOps discipline — defining, provisioning, and managing cloud infrastructure through version-controlled configuration rather than manual processes. These books cover the principles and practical implementation of IaC at scale.
27. Infrastructure as Code: Dynamic Systems for the Cloud Age
Author: Kief Morris
Year: January 2021 (2nd Edition)
In the second edition, the author elaborates on working with infrastructure stacks, servers, platforms, large systems, and distributed teams. Look forward to learning how to define everything as code and leverage automation to accelerate engineering innovation.
28. Terraform: Up & Running (3rd Edition)
Author: Yevgeniy Brikman
Year: September 2022 (3rd Edition)
Terraform: Up & Running is the definitive hands-on guide to HashiCorp’s Terraform, the most widely adopted IaC tool. The third edition covers Terraform modules, state management, testing infrastructure code, team workflows, and production-grade patterns. It walks you from zero to deploying real infrastructure across AWS and other providers, making it essential for any engineer working with cloud infrastructure.
Books On CI/CD
29. Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases Through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
Authors: Jez Humble and David Farley
Year: July 2010
This book goes straight to the heart of the DevOps process: the Deployment and Delivery pipeline. Jez, an SRE engineer at Google and an instructor at UC Berkeley, alongside David, a veteran developer, also covers the ecosystem you require to support optimal CI/CD in daily life — infrastructure management, virtualization, and automated testing.
30. Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps
Authors: Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim
Year: March 2018
A trio of DevOps’ brightest influencers presents four years of groundbreaking research, linking software delivery effectiveness to business value. This book provides access to the findings of these statistical methods (including several State of DevOps reports) and instructions on conducting them yourself so you can apply them in your organization.
DevOps Books About Cloud System Administration And FinOps
31. Cloud FinOps: Collaborative, Real-Time Cloud Value Decision Making
Authors: J.R. Storment, Mike Fuller
Year: January 2023 (2nd Edition)
This book introduces FinOps, a practice that brings financial accountability to cloud spending. It offers strategies for building a FinOps culture, enabling engineering and finance teams to collaborate effectively. Key topics include cost allocation, forecasting, and automation. This book provides a guide to the DNA of a highly functional cloud FinOps culture and teaches:
- How to understand and forecast your cloud spending
- How to empower engineering and finance to work together
- Cost allocation strategies to create accountability for cloud and container spend
- When and how to implement automation of repetitive cost tasks
32. The Practice of Cloud System Administration: Designing and Operating Large Distributed Systems
Authors: Thomas Limoncelli, Strate Chalup, and Christina Hogan
Year: September 2014
This practical guide to cloud system administration is for more than just operations engineers. Unlike many books that focus on either design or operations, this book provides clear, concise, yet detailed instructions on both in a single, complete handbook. Case studies from companies like Google, Etsy, Twitter, Amazon, and Netflix are also included. In the second edition, The Practice of System and Network Administration (November 2016), the authors explore optimizing updates and managing change.
Make Your DevOps Initiative Cost-Effective With CloudZero
Engineers and finance professionals need to speak the same language. Although engineers are often the first to notice technical anomalies, they rarely understand how those impact your bottom line and competitiveness since finance makes all the financial decisions.
If you want to improve cost awareness among your DevOps engineers and shift cost decisions left, CloudZero can help.
As an example, CloudZero’s real-time cost anomaly detection combs through your cloud services, detects abnormal cost patterns, and alerts teams or individuals via Slack, email, or your favorite incident response tool so they can prevent overspending.
CloudZero also aggregates costs from AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Kubernetes, Snowflake, MongoDB, New Relic, Databricks, and more. It then leverages a unique code-driven approach to granulate your costs down to the hour and present cost per customer, environment, software feature, project, team, and more.
CloudZero empowers you with the intel you need to understand how your people, products, and processes drive your cloud spend. That way, you can tell exactly what to do next to cut, reduce, and optimize your costs.
For those interested in the data behind cloud cost trends, check out our State of Cloud Cost Intelligence Report — a survey of over 1,000 engineering and finance professionals on cloud spending, cost awareness, and optimization practices.
Schedule a demo to see how CloudZero works!
FinOps In The AI Era: A Critical Recalibration
What 475 executives told us about AI and cloud efficiency.
