My favorite DevOps content from 2015

4 min readDec 15, 2015

This was originally a “holiday reading list”, offering up some of what I consider the more interesting pieces I found in 2015. It’s still a useful list of content worth consuming, so I’m dropping the wrapping paper and holiday trimmings.

I currently work as a DevOps+Agile Coach in IBM’s Cloud DevOps Transformation team. I participated in the creation of IBM’s Bluemix Garage Method (where you could likely spend days going through great content). Our focus has been on delivering value faster in a fundamentally different way. As part of these efforts, I read quite a bit, looking for useful ideas and approaches to help teams (and me) advance our understanding, tools and practices.

I’ve curated what I consider some of the more useful pieces on DevOps (with a bit of Agile and Cloud mixed in) that I’ve read this year. It tilts towards the cultural aspect of DevOps transformation as I think that’s the harder part. There’s so much great content out there; please add any of your favorites in the comments!

Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell

And you don’t even have to read; just watch, listen and enjoy Henrik Kniberg’s delightful treatment of what I consider the single most important thing to get right for Agile+DevOps success. Since cultural transformation is at the heart of a successful DevOps transformation, changing how you manage expectations and workflow is a prerequisite for success. Get this wrong and you’ll never get the rest of it really right. If you really don’t like videos, try this related Medium post by Josh Elman.

7 Signs You’re Doing DevOps Wrong

There’s a crazy amount of distilled wisdom and experience in this piece. I’m not always a fan of “you’re doing it wrong” treatments, but the advice and descriptions are spot-on. And you can read it again next year and make sure it (still) doesn’t apply to you…

MVP and HDD

These two go together like scientific and method. Wrap your head around the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and really understand what data-driven decision making means with How to Implement Hypothesis Driven Development. I like the twist of using a more BDD-like language, putting the intended value of a feature or story first in the statement.

Fail at Scale: Reliability in the face of rapid change

DERP (if you take only one thing from this piece, that should be it).
This one has made the rounds with the Cloud teams I work with and generated plenty of discussion. For another take on learning from failure, try this one.

Trifecta on Technical Debt

It’s real, scary and impedes speed. Technical Debt slowly destroys a project from the inside, sort of like the proverbial frog who doesn’t realize the water he’s sitting in is in a pot on a stove until it’s too late. At his Interconnect 2016 keynote, Gene Kim led with Technical Debt as one of DevOps biggest challenges. It’s often talked about and little understood. This series on the topic by the sharp folks over at 18F draws a nice, clear picture of what it is and why you need to do something about it.

Quality, quality, quality

Testing, testing, testing. Automation, automation, automation. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, oh, wait, better stop there. Here’s a matched pair from AirBnB talking about quality at scale and the testing and code review approaches to support it. I’ll slip in this talk on Behavior Driven Development because if you’re not doing it, you should strongly consider it.

DevOps Enterprise Summit bonus bundle

At DOES2015, Gene Kim and company shared the output of several working groups on topics that the DOES2014 attendees most wanted to learn more about. The papers here represent various topics from better testing for legacy applications to organizational redesign for DevOps to metrics for improving DevOps initiatives. You can watch many of the sessions from DOES2015.

3 characteristics of an effective cloud developer

DevOps isn’t only about Cloud but it’s a big part of doing Cloud well. Dan Berg, a Distinguished Engineer with IBM’s Cloud unit, describes the skills you need to hire for (or build) to be successful.

Some inspirational words on building a culture

Some valuable wisdom on building a lasting culture from Kellan Elliott-McCrea, former CTO of Etsy. You can make it happen if you and your team really want to.

Build well and go fast!

But wait, there’s more! I liked too much about this late arrival to not include it. How can this statement not pique your interest? Devops is an ideology that seeks to change how individuals think about work, value the diversity of work done, develop deliberate acceleration of business value, and measure the effect of social and technical change.