Here are 100 books that Infrastructure as Code fans have personally recommended if you like
Infrastructure as Code.
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I’ve spent more than a decade working on infrastructure, from my early days at LinkedIn, where we had to do a massive DevOps transformation to save the company, to co-founding Gruntwork, where I had the opportunity to work with hundreds of companies on their software delivery practices. From all of this, I can say the following with certainty: the DevOps best practices that a handful of the top tech companies have figured out are not filtering down to the rest of the industry. This is making the entire software industry slower, less effective, and less secure—and I see it as my mission to fix that.
This is the best overview of data storage and distributed systems—two key concepts for building almost any piece of software today—that I've seen anywhere. Martin does a wonderful job of taking a massive body of research and distilling complicated concepts and difficult trade-offs down to a level anyone can understand.
I learned a lot about replication, partitioning, linearizability, locking, write skew, phantoms, transactions, event logs, and more. I'm also a big fan of the final chapter, The Future of Data Systems, which covers ideas such as "unbundling the database", end-to-end event streams, and an important discussion on ethics in programming and data systems.
Data is at the center of many challenges in system design today. Difficult issues need to be figured out, such as scalability, consistency, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability. In addition, we have an overwhelming variety of tools, including NoSQL datastores, stream or batch processors, and message brokers. What are the right choices for your application? How do you make sense of all these buzzwords? In this practical and comprehensive guide, author Martin Kleppmann helps you navigate this diverse landscape by examining the pros and cons of various technologies for processing and storing data. Software keeps changing, but the fundamental principles remain…
My passion for developing production-ready, cooperating microservices began in 2008 when I first started assisting customers in creating distributed systems—long before the term “microservices” was coined. During that time, I faced significant challenges, including grappling with the “Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing”. Since then, I’ve dedicated most of my career to deepening my understanding of these complexities and finding ways to address them through robust architecture, design patterns, and the right tools.
Kubernetes is the go-to tool for orchestrating a landscape of cooperating microservices, making it a crucial skill to master.
This book guided me through Kubernetes, from the basics, such as pods, services, and deployments, to more advanced topics, like its inner workings and auto-scaling resources. What I particularly appreciate is the balance between theory and practical examples, reinforced by exercises with GitHub-hosted source code, which I also found helpful as a starting point for building real-world applications.
With Kubernetes, users don't have to worry about which specific machine in their data center their application is running on. Each layer in their application is decoupled from other layers so they can scale, update, and maintain them independently.
Kubernetes in Action teaches developers how to use Kubernetes to deploy self-healing scalable distributed applications. By the end, readers will be able to build and deploy applications in a proper way to take full advantage of the Kubernetes platform.
I’ve spent more than a decade working on infrastructure, from my early days at LinkedIn, where we had to do a massive DevOps transformation to save the company, to co-founding Gruntwork, where I had the opportunity to work with hundreds of companies on their software delivery practices. From all of this, I can say the following with certainty: the DevOps best practices that a handful of the top tech companies have figured out are not filtering down to the rest of the industry. This is making the entire software industry slower, less effective, and less secure—and I see it as my mission to fix that.
This is one of those books that changed how I thought about and approached software development. First, the book addressed the pain points that I had run into so often: the problems with infrequent, manual deployments, the outages caused by changing configuration rather than source code, the nightmare of merge conflicts that you get from long-lived feature branches, and so on.
Then, it showed how to flip the typical software development process on its head through CI / CD, changing the default from “our software is broken, and we need an integration and release process to get it working” to “our software is always working, and we can release it at any time.” Once I read it, I could never go back to the old way.
Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process.This groundbreaking new book sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers, and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours-sometimes even minutes-no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base.
Jez Humble and David Farley begin by presenting the foundations of a rapid,…
I’ve spent more than a decade working on infrastructure, from my early days at LinkedIn, where we had to do a massive DevOps transformation to save the company, to co-founding Gruntwork, where I had the opportunity to work with hundreds of companies on their software delivery practices. From all of this, I can say the following with certainty: the DevOps best practices that a handful of the top tech companies have figured out are not filtering down to the rest of the industry. This is making the entire software industry slower, less effective, and less secure—and I see it as my mission to fix that.
This book felt like a chance to sit with a few experienced Ops people and hear their war stories.
The book is full of concrete, actionable learnings that are essential for running software, including operational requirements (e.g., configuration, draining, hot swaps, feature toggles, graceful degradation, etc.), software architecture (e.g., three-tier web service, four-tier web service, load balancing models etc.), scaling patterns (e.g., horizontal duplication, service splits, caching, etc.), resiliency patterns (software vs hardware resiliency, spare capacity, failure domains, etc.), and much more.
I loved being able to pick up decades of experience and hard-won knowledge by just flipping through a few pages of a book!
"There's an incredible amount of depth and thinking in the practices described here, and it's impressive to see it all in one place."
-Win Treese, coauthor of Designing Systems for Internet Commerce
The Practice of Cloud System Administration, Volume 2, focuses on "distributed" or "cloud" computing and brings a DevOps/SRE sensibility to the practice of system administration. Unsatisfied with books that cover either design or operations in isolation, the authors created this authoritative reference centered on a comprehensive approach.
Case studies and examples from Google, Etsy, Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, and other industry giants are explained in practical ways that…
I am an information architect, writer, and community organizer on a mission to make information architecture education accessible to everybody. I started practicing IA in pure pursuit of stronger visual design, but in the two decades since have developed an insatiable appetite for understanding and teaching the practical skills that make people better sensemakers, regardless of their role or medium. The books I chose for this list are all foundational to me becoming the sensemaker that I am today. I offer them as suggestions because they are not the books you will find should you search for “Information Architecture” yet they have all become my go-to recommendations for helping others to strengthen their own sensemaking.
You might not think of excitement when you hear the words “Digital Governance” but I can assure you that this book is a real page-turner…especially if your job involves managing large-scale information messes. There is a special kind of chaos that only information and knowledge workers can understand and this book paints a picture so many of us have seen in practice but in a way that leaves the reader inspired to fight another day, instead of wallowing in a sea of information-induced self-pity.
I recommend this book because I have seen too many information architecture efforts die on the vine due to a lack of good governance. The frameworks and recommendations in this book mean I always have a playbook to hand to teams in need.
Few organizations realize a return on their digital investment. They’re distracted by political infighting and technology-first solutions. To reach the next level, organizations must realign their assets—people, content, and technology—by practicing the discipline of digital governance. Managing Chaos inspires new and necessary conversations about digital governance and its transformative power to support creativity, real collaboration, digital quality, and online growth.
I have worked in IT for over 25 years, creating and securing software. I am completely obsessed with ensuring that our software is more reliable, that its integrity can be trusted, and that it keeps our secrets safe. I am not only a computer scientist but an ethical hacker who works hard to create a dialogue between software developers and all of the people who work in our security industry. I am a teacher, a community leader, and a computer nerd who shares messages and lessons wherever she goes.
This book is set in the same universe as The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project, but it's at a new company named investments unlimited.
It's also a fictitious story, but with all brand new characters, and brand new problems! In this book they cover security much more deeply than any of the other previous books, talking about how compliance and audit can work together with the information security and DevOps teams.
They talk about common problems that I have faced in many organizations, and a lot of the stories feel so familiar I wonder if the authors have followed me around throughout my career.
Although of course they save the day in the end, there are many parts of the book where we're not quite sure if they're going to make it or not with various characters learning to see things in new ways, so that they can make…
In the vein of the bestselling The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project, Investments Unlimited radically rethinks how organizations can handle the audit, compliance, and security of their software systems-even in highly regulated industries. By introducing concepts, tools, and ideas to reimagine governance, Investments Unlimited catalyzes a more humane way to enable high-velocity software delivery that is inherently more secure.
Investments Unlimited, Inc. has accomplished what many other firms in their industry have failed to do: they have successfully navigated the transition from legacy ways of working to the digital frontier. With the help of DevOps practices, Investments Unlimited delivers…
Being able to understand and change reality through our knowledge and skill is literal magic. We’re building systems with so many exciting and unexpected properties that can be exploited and repurposed for both good and evil. I want to keep some of that magic and help people engineer – build great systems that make people’s lives better. I’ve been securing (and breaking) systems, from operating rooms to spaceships, from banks to self-driving cars for over 25 years. The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that if security is not infused from the start, we’re forced to rely on what ought to be our last lines of defense. This list helps you infuse security into your systems.
When I worked in application security at Microsoft, we still had products that shipped every few years. I learned to scale application security in that world, but many people live in a different world now. AAS helped me understand which of our approaches translated well, which had to be transformed, and which needed to be discarded or replaced. I regularly refer back to it, even a few years later.
Agile continues to be the most adopted software development methodology among organizations worldwide, but it generally hasn't integrated well with traditional security management techniques. And most security professionals aren't up to speed in their understanding and experience of agile development. To help bridge the divide between these two worlds, this practical guide introduces several security tools and techniques adapted specifically to integrate with agile development.
Written by security experts and agile veterans, this book begins by introducing security principles to agile practitioners, and agile principles to security practitioners. The authors also reveal problems they encountered in their own experiences with…
I love computers, and especially computer systems. I’m interested in how different pieces of hardware and software, like processors, operating systems, compilers, and linkers, work together to get things done. Early in my career, as a software security tester, I studied how different components interacted to find vulnerabilities. Now that I work on compilers, I focus on the systems that transform source code into a running program. I’m also interested in how computer systems are shaped by the people who build and use them—I believe that creating safer, more reliable software is a social problem as much as a technical one.
One of the best ways to understand how software works is to study how it fails. When I was just starting my career in software security, I read this book to learn about binary exploits like buffer overflows. It’s been a long time since I’ve written a binary exploit, but digging into the nitty-gritty, low-level details of how software runs on a real system has helped with everything I’ve done as an engineer since.
A lot has changed since this book was published in 2008 (and running the accompanying Live CD has gotten trickier), but the fundamental concepts are as relevant as ever.
Hacking is the art of creative problem solving, whether that means finding an unconventional solution to a difficult problem or exploiting holes in sloppy programming. Many people call themselves hackers, but few have the strong technical foundation needed to really push the envelope. Rather than merely showing how to run existing exploits, author Jon Erickson explains how arcane hacking techniques actually work. To share the art and science of hacking in a way that is accessible to everyone, Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, 2nd Edition introduces the fundamentals of C programming from a hacker's perspective. The included LiveCD provides a…
As a kid, I used to do all the math problems in my textbooks just for fun, even if they weren’t part of a homework assignment. My grandchildren cringe when I tell them this. I am a researcher and educator in secure software engineering and have enjoyed a productive career in software development and management, software engineering and software security research, and software and secure software engineering education.
This book is a “how-to” guide for teams developing secure software. Written by a team of experts, it covers the important issues in developing software that is better able to prevent successful attacks. The book contains many references, a strategy, and an implementation guide with cross-references. For each topic, the maturity of practice at the time of writing is provided, as well as an indication of the audience.
"This book's broad overview can help an organization choose a set of processes, policies, and techniques that are appropriate for its security maturity, risk tolerance, and development style. This book will help you understand how to incorporate practical security techniques into all phases of the development lifecycle."
-Steve Riley, senior security strategist, Microsoft Corporation
"There are books written on some of the topics addressed in this book, and there are other books on secure systems engineering. Few address the entire life cycle with a comprehensive overview and discussion of emerging trends and topics as well as this one."
Joanne McNeil has written about internet culture for over fifteen years. Her book considers the development of the internet from a user's perspective since the launch of the World Wide Web. Her interest in digital technology spans from the culture that enabled the founding of major companies in Silicon Valley to their reception in broader culture.
A thorough look at the origins of personal computing and connections between computer users beginning in the 1960s that highlights the BASIC programming language and The Oregon Trail game. Shines a light on the role that universities and the education system played in fostering networks between users.
Silicon Valley gets all the credit for digital creativity, but this account of the pre-PC world, when computing meant more than using mature consumer technology, challenges that triumphalism.
The invention of the personal computer liberated users from corporate mainframes and brought computing into homes. But throughout the 1960s and 1970s a diverse group of teachers and students working together on academic computing systems conducted many of the activities we now recognize as personal and social computing. Their networks were centered in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Illinois, but they connected far-flung users. Joy Rankin draws on detailed records to explore how…
