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NEXT GEN DEVOPS A Managers Guide to DevOps and SRE

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I’m excited to announce a new edition of Next Gen DevOps. Newly subtitled A Managers guide to DevOps and SRE. This third edition, has been comprehensively restructured and rewritten as a definitive guide for managers.

I wrote the first edition of the book in 2012, at that time, as hard as it is to believe now, many senior technology leaders remained unconvinced about the DevOps paradigm.

I felt this very keenly when I was working on my DevOps Transformation Framework. For any readers that don’t already know it wasn’t my initial intention to write a book at all. I wanted to create a framework for DevOps transformations. As I worked on the framework I realised that many of the assertions I was basing the framework on were unproven to many in the Industry. I ended up creating so much exposition to explain it all that it made more sense to collect it into a book.

I’ve had loads of great feedback in the 7 years that the book has been available. Over that time the main criticism I’ve received is that the book wasn’t instructional enough.

The book wasn’t originally intended to be instructional, that’s what the framework was for. The idea was that if executives could see where the old silos of development, testing and operations were failing and could see a clearly presented alternative thoroughly proven from first principles and supported by anecdotes they could work with their leadership team on their own transformation programme that suited their organisation. That’s where the Next Gen DevOps Transformation Framework would come in to help them to structure that transformation.

That isn’t what happened. Executives were convinced of the rightness of DevOps by a vast weight of evidence from multiple sources. Evidence like Puppet’s State of DevOps reports, various Gartner analyses, pitches from new specialist consultancies like Contino and the DevOps Group (who were eating the older consultancies lunches in the DevOps arena) and recruiters like Linuxrecruit and Esynergy and a huge wealth of success stories of which my small book was merely a drop in the ocean. These executives were then challenging their teams to create transformation programmes. Managers were then looking to my book, and others like The Phoenix Project, to help them figure out what good looked like.

Unfortunately my book wasn’t hitting that spot, until now. This new edition is aimed squarely at those managers looking to migrate development teams to DevOps working practices or operations teams to SRE.

Since I published the second edition I’ve provided strategic leadership to the Department for Work and Pension’s cloud and DevOps migration programme and helped Just Eat improve their resilience and performance and transitioned their operations team to SRE. This new book adds experience from both of those initiatives.

I’ve learned a new technique for creating departmental strategy from business goals which I’ve included in chapter six. I moved the popular history chapter to an appendix as it’s inclusion confused some readers. The point I was trying to make (and if I have to explain it I’ve clearly failed) was that the separate development and operations silos were the anomaly not DevOps. By moving that to an appendix I’ve been able to create a smoother flow from the problem through to the solution and on to a new chapter  about building DevOps teams, which includes a lot of information about hiring engineers. I’ve changed the management theories chapter into a chapter specifically about managing DevOps and SRE teams. Following on from that chapter five details how DevOps teams work with other teams. Each subsequent chapter has been re-focused away from transforming whole departments down to transforming individual teams. I haven’t removed any content so if you are looking for guidance about changing an entire technology department that is all still there. In addition to that there is now a wealth of guidance to help managers transform their teams and supporting their peers as they transform their teams.

If you bought either of the first two editions I’ll send you a free PDF of the new edition, if you email me at grant@nextgendevops.com with a picture of you holding a copy of the book in paperback or showing on your e-reader and give me permission to use those pictures in a future blog post.

NEXT GEN DEVOPS Second Edition!

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NEXT GEN DEVOPS: Creating the DevOps Organisation is getting a second edition!

I’ve been working on it for a while but it’s been my sole focus since I published the NEXT GEN DEVOPS TRANSFORMATION FRAMEWORK. Paperback_CoverThe first edition came out around a year ago and a lot has changed since then.

The conversation now seems to be how organisations should approach DevOps rather than whether they should consider it. Friends and I are now talking about dropping the term DevOps because we feel it’s just good software engineering practice. Patterns that I dimly glimpsed two years ago are now clearly defined and have several supporting case studies.

The core theme of the book hasn’t changed. In fact none of the existing content has changed at all. I’ve corrected a few formatting mistakes here and there and I’ve been able to add some great photo’s that I think really bring the history chapter to life. Everyone who’s spoken to me about the book has commented that it’s their favourite chapter and now it’s even better!

All new content!

Paperback_Cover_2nd_edition_smApart from a redesigned cover I’ve added several new chapters the first of which is entitled The only successful DevOps model is product-centric which looks at the four organisations that are most frequently held up as DevOps exemplars Etsy, Netflix, Facebook and Amazon to see what they have in common and what lessons other organisations can learn from their successes and failures. I wrote this chapter to address a comment I’ve heard from several readers that they wanted more explicit instructions about how to transform their teams and organisations.

That’s also the reason I added the next new chapter: The Next Gen DevOps Transformation Framework this chapter provides explicit instructions describing how my DevOps Transformation Framework can be used to transition a business towards DevOps working practices. It impossible to re-format a framework designed to be used interactively on an HD screen to a 6×9″ paperback but I’ve been able to provide some supporting contextual information as well as providing some example implementations. This combined with the Playfish case-studies I’ve published here on the blog should provide people with everything they need to begin their journey to DevOps.

The final bit of new content is an appendix to the history chapter. I learned a lot while I was researching the history chapter, far more than I could include without completing losing the thread of the chapter. What interested me most of all was the enormous role played by women in the development of the IT profession. I’ve worked with some great men and women in my 20 years in IT but I’ve only met two female Operations Engineers. Where are the rest? At Playfish I worked with a lot of female developers but whenever I was hiring I never met any women interested in careers in Operations. I couldn’t shake the thought that something was wrong with this situation. Over the past year I’ve read a lot about the declining numbers of women in IT so I decided to share what I learned while writing the history chapter and do a little research of my own.

Reduced price!

I need to eat some humble pie now. I think I made a mistake when I initially priced the book. When I was writing the book my focus was not on book sales. I know a couple of people who have authored and co-authored books and read numerous articles about how writing will not make you rich so I was under no illusions about my future wealth. I chose the price because I felt that it would lend credibility.

I didn’t factor in that ebooks and self-publishing has changed the market. When I published the book Amazon displayed a little graph demonstrating that $9.99 was a sweet spot for pricing and that I’d make more money publishing at that price. I’m not doing this for the money so what do I care?

That’s where I made a mistake. I don’t care about the money but I do want my message to get out. I think my book is unique because very few authors have spent 17 years operating online services and very few authors had the unique opportunity to work on one of the first examples of continuous delivery.

So the 2nd edition will be priced at $9.99. I understand that people who have paid the higher price for the first edition will quite rightly feel a little put out by this so I intend to publish the second edition as an update to the first this means that those people who bought the book on Kindle can just update their copy to get the second edition.

I can’t update the paperback version and I can’t give them away for free but I do have a plan. I’m going to be publishing a PDF edition of the second edition and selling it through my own online store. I can’t get details of who bought my book so I’m going to do my best to operate an honour system. If you bought a paperback version of Next Gen DevOps and want a PDF copy of the second edition email grant@nextgendevops.com and I’ll send you the PDF version.

While I don’t know who has bought paperbacks I do know how many paperbacks I’ve sold so once I’ve given away that many PDF copies the giveaway will be over so email me asap to ensure you get your free copy.

The second edition will be published in the next couple of weeks and will be accompanied by a formal press-release.