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

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

Curated operations products we use and recommend. Each item tested in real-world scenarios. Find 2 products with detailed reviews, pros, and cons.

Operations Products

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

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production