DevOps for the Desperate

DevOps for the Desperate is a hands-on, no-nonsense guide for those who land in a DevOps environment and need to get up and running quickly.

This book introduces fundamental concepts software developers need to know to flourish in a modern DevOps environment including infrastructure as code, configuration management, security, containerization and orchestration, monitoring and alerting, and troubleshooting. Readers will follow along with hands-on examples to learn how to tackle common DevOps tasks.
 
The book begins with an exploration of DevOps concepts using Vagrant and Ansible to build systems with repeatable and predictable states, including configuring a host with user-based security. Next up is a crash course on containerization, orchestration, and delivery using Docker, Kubernetes, and a CI/CD pipeline. The book concludes with a primer in monitoring and alerting with tips for troubleshooting common host and application issues.
 
You’ll learn how to:

• •  Use Ansible to manage users and groups, and enforce complex passwords
• •  Create a security policy for administrative permissions, and automate a host-based firewall
• •  Get started with Docker to containerize applications, use Kubernetes for orchestration, and deploycode using a CI/CD pipeline
• •  Build a monitoring stack, investigate common metric patterns, and trigger alerts
• •  Troubleshoot and analyze common issues and errors found on hosts

  Review

“DevOps for the Desperate is a short, approachable guided tour of a few core tools in the software operations toolkit.

Structured as a set of hands-on tutorials in topics like system administration basics, configuration tools like Ansible and Vagrant, and orchestration tools like Kubernetes, this book covers a lot of ground quickly. The focus is very much on the practical, rather than the philosophy of DevOps. Don’t expect to use this as your sole reference on DevOps topics, but this is worthwhile as a gentle starting point for the absolute beginner to software operations.”
—Laura Nolan, Slack
 

About the Author

Bradley Smith is a Director of Infrastructure and resides in Denver, Colorado. He has been an engineer for more than 20 years at many startups and businesses of varying sizes. He’s built and trained numerous DevOps, SRE, and software engineering teams. A Boston native, Bradley graduated from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.