Michael Nygard's definitive guide for production hardening, resilience, and real-world failures. Learn how to design systems that survive in production, not just work in development.

Release It! is the book I read after my first production incident that took down the entire service. Nygard's chapter on circuit breakers saved me from cascading failures, and the section on timeouts and retries helped me understand why our API calls were hanging. The second edition adds chapters on modern patterns like service meshes and chaos engineering, but the core content—stability patterns, capacity planning, deployment—is timeless. The book is full of war stories: real failures from real systems, and how to prevent them. The chapter on capacity planning gave me a framework for understanding when systems will break, and the section on deployment showed me why blue-green deployments matter. My only critique is that some examples feel dated, but the principles are sound. I've recommended it to developers who've never had to deal with production failures, and it's helped them understand why the code that works in development doesn't always work in production. Essential reading for anyone deploying software to real users.

Michael Nygard's guide to production hardening, resilience, and real-world failures. Learn to design systems that survive in production.

Release It! Design & Deploy Production-Ready Software

Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (2nd Edition)

Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais' modern framework for designing software teams and reducing cognitive load. Learn how team structure affects software architecture and delivery speed.

Team Topologies is the book that explained why our microservices architecture wasn't working. Skelton and Pais' framework—stream-aligned teams, platform teams, enabling teams, complicated-subsystem teams—showed me that our team structure didn't match our architecture. We had one team trying to own too many services, which created cognitive load and slowed everything down. The book's principle that team structure and software architecture are inseparable changed how I think about system design. The chapter on cognitive load helped me understand why some teams ship faster than others, and the section on team interactions—collaboration, X-as-a-Service, facilitating—gave me a vocabulary for discussing team boundaries. My only critique is that some organizations can't restructure teams easily, but the principles still apply. I've recommended it to engineering managers trying to organize teams around services, and it's helped them see why Conway's Law matters. Essential reading for anyone designing teams or architectures.

Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais' framework for designing software teams and reducing cognitive load. Learn how team structure affects architecture and delivery.

Team Topologies: Organizing Software Teams for Fast Flow

Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

Gene Kim, George Spafford, and Kevin Behr's DevOps novel that teaches operations, bottlenecks, and flow. Learn the principles of continuous delivery through a story about saving a failing IT project.

The Phoenix Project is the book I hand to executives who don't understand why deployments are always breaking. It's a novel—a story about an IT manager trying to save a failing project—but it teaches the principles of DevOps, continuous delivery, and the theory of constraints through narrative. The characters are recognizable: the overworked sysadmin, the developer who ships code without testing, the manager who doesn't understand why things take so long. The book shows how small changes—automating deployments, reducing batch sizes, making work visible—compound into dramatic improvements. I've recommended it to three different teams, and all of them said it helped them understand DevOps in a way that technical books never managed. The story format makes the concepts stick, and the ending—where the team actually succeeds—feels achievable. My only critique is that some of the technical details feel simplified, but that's intentional: this isn't a how-to guide, it's a why-it-matters story. If you're trying to get buy-in for DevOps practices, this book is your secret weapon.

Gene Kim's DevOps novel teaching operations, bottlenecks, and flow. Learn continuous delivery principles through a story about saving a failing IT project.

The Phoenix Project: DevOps Novel About IT Operations

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

Gene Kim's developer-centered companion story to The Phoenix Project about cognitive load and platform engineering. Learn how developers can fight back against technical debt and bureaucracy.

The Unicorn Project is The Phoenix Project from the developer's perspective, and it's the book I wish I'd read when I was drowning in technical debt. Kim tells the story of a developer trying to ship features while fighting against bureaucracy, legacy systems, and cognitive load. The book's focus on developer experience and platform engineering resonated deeply—I've been the developer who can't get a local environment set up, who has to wait days for infrastructure changes, who can't test code because the test suite is broken. The chapter on the five ideals—locality and simplicity, focus and flow, improvement of daily work, psychological safety, and customer focus—gave me a framework for advocating for better tooling and processes. The story shows how small wins—fixing the test suite, automating deployments, reducing cognitive load—build momentum. My only critique is that some of the solutions feel too easy compared to real-world constraints, but the principles are sound. I've recommended it to developers who feel stuck in bureaucratic organizations, and it's helped them see that change is possible, even if it's slow.

Gene Kim's developer-centered story about cognitive load and platform engineering. Learn how developers can fight back against technical debt and bureaucracy.

The Unicorn Project: Developer Story About Technical Debt

The Unicorn Project: A Novel About Digital Disruption, Redshirts, and Rebelling Against the Ancient Powerful Order

Google's SRE practices for operating reliable, scalable production services, covering SLIs/SLOs, automation, and incident response.

Eight years after its release, Google’s SRE book is still the reference I hand to engineers before they rotate onto incident response. The SLI/SLO chapters taught our team to negotiate error budgets with product, and the practical essays on toil, release engineering, and postmortems shaped how we run production reviews. We paired the book with the Workbook to build concrete exercises—SLO be-briefs, simulated incidents, and blameless postmortems—and the combination has leveled up our on-call culture. Some tooling examples are dated, but the principles (measure reliability, automate everything you can, embrace blameless learning) are timeless. If you're designing or operating distributed systems, this belongs on your shelf.

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production

Research-backed field guide that ties lean software delivery habits to measurable business outcomes, unpacking the DORA metrics, cultural foundations, and continuous delivery capabilities that separated top performers in the Accelerate State of DevOps reports.

I revisited Accelerate with my platform leadership team last summer, and the data still punches above its weight. The authors translate years of DevOps research into a playbook you can actually socialize with executives: define the four DORA metrics, invest in trunk-based development, shrink batch sizes, and relentlessly remove deployment toil. The chapters on culture and psychological safety were the missing piece when we launched our own delivery initiative—no tooling overhaul would have landed without that buy-in. Every time I run a value stream workshop now, this book is sitting on the table.

Research-backed playbook translating DevOps research into executive language. Learn DORA metrics, trunk-based development, and cultural foundations.

Accelerate: Science of Lean Software & DevOps Building

Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations

Curated devops products we use and recommend. Each item tested in real-world scenarios. Find 6 products with detailed reviews, pros, and cons.

DevOps Products