Books To Start Your Career in Cloud, DevOps, or SRE in 2024

I am an avid reader of technical books, specifically those focused on Cloud, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). In this post, I will share a list of books that I believe are essential for anyone looking to start or advance their career in Cloud, DevOps, or SRE. These books will help you build a strong foundation in the top skills required in these fields. While this post focuses primarily on Amazon AWS for public cloud, I will also include a few vendor-neutral books.

Note: This is my honest opinion, and I am not affiliated with any of these book authors or publishers.

How Linux Works, 3rd Edition: What Every Superuser Should Know by Brian Ward and the Linux Command Line, 2nd Edition by William Shotts

Learning Linux is the first step before acquiring any other skills in DevOps. These books are excellent for building a strong foundation in Linux internals and getting familiar with the Linux command line, which is essential for excelling in the DevOps space.

Python

Programming is the second most important skill after Linux for DevOps or SRE. I recommend starting with Python Cookbook: Recipes for Mastering Python 3. Begin with the basics, then move on to object-oriented concepts, databases, APIs, and scripting. Eventually, you should learn about MVC and other design patterns to build comprehensive products, not just scripts. As a production engineer, you will need to develop many infrastructure tools.

Solutions Architect's Handbook — Third Edition and AWS Cookbook

These books provide a comprehensive view of what an AWS engineer needs to know. They were particularly helpful in preparing for the AWS Solution Associate exam, covering topics such as MVC architecture, domain-driven design, container-based application architecture, cloud-native design patterns, and performance considerations. The AWS Cookbook is excellent for practical labs and contains useful topics like secure web content delivery, dynamic access with security groups, automated password rotation for RDS, and big data solutions.

Terraform up and Running by Yevgeniy Brikman

Terraform is a widely used infrastructure automation tool in DevOps. This book covers the basics, and intermediate topics like managing state files, creating reusable modules, Terraform syntax, and more. It also addresses the challenge of managing secrets and provides options for integrating with Docker and Kubernetes. The book concludes with strategies for managing Terraform code within a team.

Continuous Integration and Deployment

This skill is crucial for developers, DevOps, SRE, or any engineer involved in development or operations. Tools like Jenkins, GitLab, and GitHub Actions are commonly used. For Kubernetes environments, GitOps tools like Flux and ArgoCD are popular. I recommend Automating DevOps with GitLab CI/CD Pipelines by Christopher Cowell for those starting with CI/CD.

Kubernetes

This technology has been trending and growing rapidly. For theoretical knowledge, the Kubernetes documentation is sufficient, but for hands-on learning, I recommend The Kubernetes Bible: The Definitive Guide to Deploying and Managing Kubernetes Across Cloud and On-Prem Environments. Microservice development and deployment are on the rise. For AWS, small microservices-based products can be deployed with ECS but for large-scale products, Kubernetes is required. 

System Design

This is a vendor-neutral skill. I recommend Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann to learn how to build reliable and scalable systems.

Finally, I acknowledge that merely reading books won't make you an expert. You need to engage in extensive hands-on labs to excel in this field.