I didn’t just make a lot of this stuff up. I did some pretty extensive reading to understand what it is that other organisations do. Here are some of the books that I’d recommend:
The Phoenix Project — This was the first piece of DevOps propaganda that I read. I didn’t fully understand what it was to have great IT Operations, and frankly I just wanted to do some cool cloud stuff. Gene Kim did a fantastic job at telling a story about an old-school organisation with outdated change processes, and how it transformed into a bastion of Continuous Delivery.
The DevOps Handbook — This is another one by Gene Kim, but is a collaborative piece with Patrick Debois, John Willis, and Jez Humble. If you need to find out where it is that you need to start, then this is the book for you. It outlines a lot of the problems with traditional IT Operations, and makes some great recommendations on what to change.
Site Reliability Engineering — Is a great book by the Google SRE Team which really focuses and enforces the ideas of building resilient systems, and what it means to put a lot of engineering thought and design behind the systems that you run.
Continuous Delivery — Is an awesome book by Jez Humble and David Farley that you see a lot of people quoting or referencing when trying to enforce the legitimacy of their claims (kind of like The Bible). Jokes aside, this is a great read!
Kanban Automotive Revolution (Boardgame) — If you can’t get anyone at work to read a book because they’re too busy, maybe try a boardgame!