Fundamentals of DevOps and Software Delivery

By Yevgeniy Brikman

While most books about DevOps focus only on high-level theory and culture, this practical, hands-on guide focuses on the actual tools, practices, and technologies that constitute software delivery. Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman (author of Terraform: Up & Running) shows you how to run and maintain software in production through dozens of step-by-step examples:

Apps: VMs (EC2), containers (Kubernetes), serverless (Lambda)
Infrastructure: Terraform/OpenTofu, Packer, Docker, Ansible
CI/CD: pipelines, automated testing, release automation
Networking: VPCs, VPNs, DNS, service meshes
Architecture: environments, libraries, microservices
Security: secrets management, encryption (TLS, AES)
Data: relational DBs, NoSQL DBs, file stores, CDNs
Monitoring: metrics, logs, events, alerts

By the time you’re done with the book, you will have had hands-on practice with all the essential skills required by every DevOps, SRE, and full stack developer job.

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How this book is different

Here's what makes this book different from all other books about DevOps:

Go beyond theory

Whereas most books on DevOps focus on culture, values, and organizational structure, I've found that when most people talk about DevOps, what they are really interested in is the mechanics of effective software delivery. With this book, you get not just the theory, but also a chance to learn all the processes, tools, and techniques that are required to run and maintain software in production on an ongoing basis.

See how the pieces fit together

There are many books out there on individual aspects of software delivery: e.g., books focused entirely on Kubernetes or Terraform or CI/CD. This is the only book that shows you how to put all the pieces together. You'll start with the basics—an app running on a single server—and work your way up to microservices in a Kubernetes cluster with a service mesh, automated deployment pipeline, end-to-end encryption, and more.

Become a practitioner

This is a book for current and aspiring practitioners: for the brave people who are responsible for running and maintaining software in production. That includes roles in operations (Site Reliability Engineers, DevOps Engineers, Sysadmins, Operations Engineers, Release Engineers) and development (Software Engineers, Software Developers, Web Developers, and Full Stack Engineers).

Get hands-on experience

If you really want to learn something, reading is not enough. You also need practice. That's why this book includes dozens of hands-on code examples (which you can find in this GitHub repo). Instead of only reading, you get to learn by doing, following the step-by-step instructions to deploy apps, manage infrastructure, configure CI/CD pipelines, and more. See the following video for a walkthrough:

Praise for the book

I'm not aware of any other book that provides such practical advice on operations and systems administration in the context of delivering and running software. Jim's book stays refreshingly focused on the real-world aspects of DevOps—what most people actually mean when they use the term—rather than the theory.

Kief Morris, distinguished infrastructure engineer at Thoughtworks and author of Infrastructure as Code

An excellent step-by-step guide to getting practical things done—the kind of thing I wish I'd had when I was starting off.

Niall Murphy, co-founder & CEO of Stanza and co-author of Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems

Meticulously organized, chock full of examples, buoyed by research and practical experience, Fundamentals of DevOps and Software Delivery is another outstanding project from the prolific Yevgeniy “Jim” Brikman. The breadth of technology in this space can feel overwhelming, but Jim manages to isolate the signal from the noise, emphasizing the prevailing industry best practices while smartly identifying pitfalls along the way.

Ben Whaley, staff software engineer at Chime and co-author of UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook

If you want to learn DevOps principles quickly, and learn them in a way that's directly applicable to your problems, buy this book.

Yousif Akbar, principal software engineer at Gruntwork

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About the author

Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman is the co-founder of Gruntwork, a company that that offers products & services for setting up world-class DevOps Foundations. He's also the author of two other books published by O'Reilly: Terraform: Up & Running, the definitive book on Terraform and OpenTofu, and Hello, Startup, a hands-on guide to building products, technologies, and teams in a startup.

Previously, Jim spent more than a decade building infrastructure and products that serve hundreds of millions of users at LinkedIn, TripAdvisor, Cisco Systems, and Thomson Financial. For more info, check out ybrikman.com.

Book outline

Chapter 1

How to Deploy Your App

Personal computers vs servers
On-prem vs cloud
PaaS vs IaaS

Chapter 2

How to Manage Your Infrastructure as Code

Ad hoc scripts
Configuration management tools
Server templating tools
Provisioning tools

Chapter 3

How to Manage Your Apps Using Orchestration Tools

Server orchestration
VM orchestration
Container orchestration
Serverless orchestration

Chapter 4

How to Version, Build, and Test Your Code

Version control
Build systems
Dependency management
Automated testing

Chapter 5

How to Set Up CI and CD

Trunk-based development
Feature toggles
Deployment strategies and pipelines

Chapter 6

How to Work with Multiple Teams and Environments

Multiple environments
Multiple libraries
Multiple services

Chapter 7

How to Set Up Networking

Domain Name System (DNS)
Virtual private clouds (VPCs)
Network access and hardening
Service discovery, service meshes

Chapter 8

How to Secure Communication and Storage

Cryptography
Encryption at rest
Encryption in transit

Chapter 9

How to Store Data

Relational DBs, schemas
NoSQL, NewSQL, queues, streams
File storage and CDNs
Backup and recovery

Chapter 10

How to Monitor Your Systems

Logs and log aggregation
Metrics, dashboards, alerts
Observability and tracing

Chapter 11

The Future of DevOps and Software Delivery

Infrastructureless
Generative AI
Shift left, supply chain security
Platform engineering

Open Source Code Samples

The book includes dozens of code samples for you to try, which you can find here:

https://github.com/brikis98/devops-book

Blog posts

Blog posts, appendices, and other useful information related to the book.

How to find AMI IDs for Amazon Linux and Ubuntu

Feb 24, 2025 · 9 min read · Comments

Learn the several copy-pasteable recipes for programmatically finding the IDs of the latest Amazon-managed AMIs, such as Amazon Linux and Ubuntu, using tools such as the AWS CLI, OpenTofu, Packer, Ansible, and AWS SSM Parameter Store.

How to manage state and environments with OpenTofu

Jan 28, 2025 · 18 min read · Comments

Learn about OpenTofu's powerful features for managing state, and how they differ from Terraform, including how to store state, encrypt state, and how to manage state across multiple environments.

How to authenticate to AWS with IAM Identity Center

Jan 25, 2025 · 11 min read · Comments

Learn the modern and secure way to authenticate to AWS, both on the web and the command line, using IAM Identity Center.

Learn Git and GitHub in 15 Minutes

Jan 20, 2025 · 15 min read · Comments

Learn the basics of Git and GitHub in 15 minutes with this hands-on tutorial. Topics include version control, repositories, branches, commits, merges, pull requests, and more.

News

<em>Fundamentals of DevOps and Software Delivery</em> has been published!

Fundamentals of DevOps and Software Delivery has been published!

May 20, 2025

The final version of Fundamentals of DevOps and Software Delivery has been published and the ebook and print edition are now available online and in your local bookstores! Learn more about why I wrote the book, and why you may want to read it, in this announcement blog post.

Get your copy now! »

The early release and pre-orders are now available!

Jun 25, 2024

The early release is now available at O'Reilly Media! Grab a copy of the ebook before the final version is done so you can start learning today, and receive new chapters and updates as they are written, plus the final ebook bundle when the book is released. If you prefer to wait for the final version, you can preorder the book at online stores now!

Get the early release or pre-order now! »