Top 10 recommended books for a DevOps manager

I have been browsing Google and Amazon sites looking for new books to read. For those of you who don't know me - due to the nature of my work for the last few months I've been focusing on security engineering but before that, for 6 years, I've been managing a DevOps and Security team. As a side note - combining DevOps and Security in one team is a very smart move. And we were doing it before the industry coined terms like SecDevOps or Rugged DevOps. But this is a topic for another day. What I realised though is that there were plenty of lists and blog posts providing recommendations for DevOps (in general) but nothing specifically targeting DevOps managers. Granted, there will be an overlap. E.g. how can you not mention The Phoenix Project, right? But at the same time the lists for DevOps engineers/practitioners and DevOps managers won't be identical.

In my previous company our CIO recommended (or I would even say - promoted - thank you Ajay!) several books to our IT leadership team. We've read them collectively and it was a very enjoyable experience to discuss chapters with my colleagues. While not necessarily technical books, I've learnt a lot from them as a manager - especially from the point of better understanding the business side.

Let's start:

	The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford This is one of my favourite books. I have it both in paper and electronic forms. I remember when I was reading it for the first time I was sharing entire paragraphs and even whole pages with my colleagues. This is how I excited I was and how well this book was resonating and matching my own professional experiences. I finished this book in just 4 nights. I have essentially made it compulsory for my team of DevOps engineers to read it. Gene Kim is a celebrity in the IT world and you just can't go wrong when you read his books or watch his talks. If you haven't read it yet - promise me that you will read it this year ;) This book describes the theory of constrains in a modern language applied to the IT world. It is a pleasure (and very enjoyable and light reading) to follow the journey of one company how they go from crisis after crisis to success of a well organised, high pace machine.
	Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation by Jez Humble, David Farley Jez Humble is another heavyweight of the DevOps world. This is a highly recommended book for anyone in software or application development. A large portion of DevOps activities revolves around automating the delivery pipeline. One of the mantras in our DevOps team was "we cannot be a bottleneck". We should be able to move with the pace of development. And when a developer checks new piece of code in - the expectation should be that in a few minutes a new build will be completed, tests will be executed and this code (automatically!) reach production.
	Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh This is not an IT book but something that any manager should read. Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos) can be controversial in his approach. As an example, he offers $2,000 to the newly hired employees to resign. Or how about removing all roles in the company operating in a completely flat organisational structure? This is very unorthodox and this makes this book very interesting to read. The book teaches us to focus on company culture and making customer service the responsibility of the entire organisation. I really liked the "ordering pizza" example. Please read the book to find out what I mean.
	Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan, John King, Halee Fischer-Wright Every organisation consists of relatively small groups of people ("tribes" in this book) and connections/interactions between those tribes. Each tribe has its own culture, which defines the behavior/attitude of the tribe and affects organisation's success as a whole.  The book teaches us how to diagnose and measure this culture, while defining 5 levels or stages. The most common are Stage 2 (passive, sarcastic, resistant to change culture) and Stage 3 (defined as "We are great, you are not").  I was really impressed by the way how tribe's thinking changes as it progresses up towards higher stages. At stage 5 a hospital has cancer as the enemy. They focus on bigger things. They don't think about competitors - they have a much larger goal in mind. You can also download a free audiobook from the official site
	Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek This book is full of inspiring stories. It is a must read if you value supportive culture in your team or the organisation as a whole. Supportive mentality leads to people willing to take more risks because they know their colleagues would do the same for them. This book is about inspiring trust and commitment.
	Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, Niall Richard Murphy In this book members of Google's SRE team cover the entire software lifecycle and share their experience of how Google builds, deploys, monitors, and maintains some of the largest software systems in the world. I would recommend this book to both DevOps and Security teams. Rugged DevOps in addition to fast pace of delivery also focuses on the reliability aspects. For larger IT teams it makes sense to have dedicated SRE teams focusing on resilience of the deployed applications. You will learn a lot about what it takes to run large online systems at scale and how to engineer these systems to maintain tight SLAs.
	Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (Pragmatic Programmers) by Michael T. Nygard This is a book about how to build software for the real world. Developers tend to focus on the positive results - that their code does what it's supposed to be doing.... under ideal conditions. Have you heard the "it works on my machine" argument? The real world is different. Instead of running on a single dev box your code will run in a farm. The server you are running on can be rebooted. A chaos monkey can pick your precious server as the next victim. The database that you rely on can be locked or your long running transaction might be killed. The WAN link you are crossing to reach a legacy corporate system may go down... You could run into so many potential (and sometimes unexpected) failures. If you want to build resilient systems, if you are the one receiving pager alerts at 3AM - this book is for you.
	The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change) by Clayton M. Christensen My previous CEO once said that his biggest fear was being outinnovated. When you are #1 it is relatively easy to defend against the copycats. By definition they will be behind as long as you keep building new products. But there is a risk of a new player disrupting the market and changing the status quo. Worse, you can do everything right and yet still lose the market share. This book teaches how not to miss or ignore "the next great wave". It was one of the books that inspired Steve Jobs

So here it is - 8 books (a nice round number) that I would like to recommend.

In order to make it 10, I would like to add 2 "honorable mentions"

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't by Jim Collins In this book the author makes an attempt to identify the factors that are responsible for the transition from being good to becoming truly great. They compare similar organisations (e.g. two financial institutions) and then show how one organisation suddenly finds something that propels them to the next level, while another organisation remains the same - good but not great. I have to admit - I have only completed about 50% of this book. I know for a fact that this is a very popular book, yet it was quite difficult for me to read. I had to set it aside for some time.

The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth Some of you might be surprised by this recommendation. This is an old book. It was quite popular back in my uni days. This is a bible for software developers. It contains LOTS of algorithms for solving various computational tasks. The reason I decided to include it here - too many developers these days don't know the fundamentals. I saw that quite often developers just copy/paste code from MSDN or StackOverflow. By exploring sections of this book and gaining understanding how certain algorithms work, a developer will go a long way in achieving true greatness.

What do you think? What is sitting on your bookshelf? Which books have inspired you? Please leave your comments below and I promise that I will check these books.