How I learned (and still learn) Site-Reliability-Engineering
Resources with which I learned the DevOps part
For a developer knowing how to publish your projects on a production server or in a specific environment can be very important. If you know certain things from the DevOps area and how to deal with them, you can better prepare your software application for the cloud or on-premise environment, e.g. health check endpoint or metrics endpoint.
Now, there are many tools and services for publishing your application. AWS, Azure, and GCP (Hyperscaler) have different possibilities and services, but they are not the only ones on the market.
From my point of view, it is helpful to start with general things like why DevOps is so important, what are the core principles behind it, and the abstract requirements that an SRE needs to know and fulfil.
Books
Site Reliability Engineering (How Google runs production systems)
A collection of essays and articles by key members of Google’s Site Reliability Engineering Team about building, deploying, monitoring, and maintaining of one of the largest software system in the world. This book is also about best practices and principles to make systems more scalable, reliable, and efficient.
Continuous Delivery (Reliable software releases through build, test, and deployment automation)
This book describes a good foundation of a rapid, reliable, and low-risk delivery process — e.g., deployment pipelines, process automation of changes from check-in to production delivery. Also, this book describes the needs of infrastructure, data and configuration management.
Continuous Architecture in Practice (Software architecture in the age of agility and DevOps)
This is one of my favourites — this book is about the fast change of software architecture in agile environments in the age of DevOps and cloud platforms and how to handle this. It describes the role of a conventional software architecture in such environments and how to adapt to this environment.
The Phoenix Project (A novel about IT, DevOps, and helping your business win)
Bill is an IT manager at Parts Unlimited. It’s Tuesday morning and on his drive into the office, Bill gets a call from the CEO.
The company’s new IT initiative, code named Phoenix Project, is critical to the future of Parts Unlimited, but the project is massively over budget and very late. The CEO wants Bill to report directly to him and fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill’s entire department will be outsourced.
With the help of a prospective board member and his mysterious philosophy of The Three Ways, Bill starts to see that IT work has more in common with manufacturing plant work than he ever imagined. With the clock ticking, Bill must organize work flow, streamline interdepartmental communications, and effectively serve the other business functions at Parts Unlimited.
In a fast-paced and entertaining style, three luminaries of the DevOps movement deliver a story that anyone who works in IT will recognize. Readers will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they’ll never view IT the same way again. [A Google book]
Learning Platforms and Websites
A Cloud Guru (A Pluralsight company)
This is an online training platform with so many courses, hands-on labs, and learning paths in the DevOps section, so you are virtually showered. You can learn about AWS, Azure, Terraform, Ansible, GCP, Linux, Kubernetes, and so on. You can create virtual VMs; sandboxes in AWS, Azure, and GCP; K8s clusters and many more. It is worth keeping an eye on this.
90 Days of DevOps
This repository by Michael Cade was built for learning the world of DevOps. He started this journey on the 1st January 2022 and planed to run through March 31st for a complete 90-day romp, spending an hour a day including weekends to get a foundational knowledge across a lot of different areas that make up DevOps.
Periodic Table of DevOps Tools
The Periodic Table of DevOps Tools is the industry’s go-to resource for identifying best-of-breed tools across the software delivery lifecycle.
Created by DevOps practitioners for DevOps practitioners, over 18,000 votes were cast across more than 400 products in 17 categories to produce the 2020 Periodic Table of DevOps Tools.
Whether you are starting fresh, filling gaps, or replacing existing DevOps tools, get started by using Periodic Table to identify the right tools for your DevOps pipeline.
The Delivery Hero Reliability Manifesto
This website is a collection of rules, guidelines, and best practices that reflect the current thinking of Delivery Hero and what it takes to build a reliable system.
DevOpsCube
A website about best practices for Kubernetes, Jenkins, and Containers. Here you can find more references to other websites, books, and platforms.
Conclusion
Learning and further education are part of daily life. Especially as a software developer or site reliability engineer, you have to stay up to date to keep your environments maintainable, scalable, reliable, and efficient.
I hope my small list of sources helps you in your daily routine. If you have any other helpful tips, please feel free to post them in the comment section or get in touch on Twitter.
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