Posted on 18 November 2019, updated on 11 December 2023.
A quick reminder about DevOps and why you should learn about it
For those who still find the notion of DevOps confusing, let me clear that up for you. The origin of DevOps lies in the problems that came up with the division of labor.
While it made sense in a context of rationalization to separate the work of ops and developers (different tasks, different mindset, reduction of cost), it also created different objectives and interests between the two teams. Ops want stability, developers want to release new features quickly.
The notion of DevOps, as part of the Agile trend, was first introduced to reconcile the interests of each team so they can work together toward a shared objective. If that is still not crystal clear to you, feel free to check this article about the DevOps culture to learn more about it.
Now you are wondering, why is that so much better than the old rationalized system? Well, while it requires a lot more communication between Dev and Ops, the use of DevOps technologies and tools (Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, Prometheus, Grafana…) will help you eliminate toil, accelerate your launch time and your response to incidents. Which means releasing new features at a fast pace and a downtime rate close to 0%. Which makes your customers happy. Which is the core metric of every good business.
Now, DevOps is not an exact science and lies in good communication: in addition to keeping yourself updated on the technologies’ fast-paced evolution, it’s important to read about other people’s experiences with it.
As the web is overflowing with information, we wrote this short article to clear your path across the DevOps’ web jungle, listing our favorite blogs, newsletters, and Twitter accounts.
Our top 3 blogs to read
- Dev.to, a small but great community to begin with DevOps
While you can find a wide variety of subjects on dev.to, the blog also happens to have an entire section dedicated to DevOps. Practical cases and short tutorials such as the “Kubernetes from the beginning” series are great resources for DevOps newbies, and though the community is still small, the members are very active when it comes to helping one another solve problems.
- Software Engineering Daily for great podcasts and articles
Don’t let the name fool you, this blog is as much about DevOps as it is about software development. Software Engineering Daily invites guests regularly to talk about their experience: Jasmine James will tell you about DevOps at Delta Air Lines, Gene Kim about how to move an organization toward DevOps. And if you don’t have time to listen to the podcasts, the transcripts are also available!
- High Scalability, stories about massive companies’ architecture
Intended for DevOps experts but understandable for many, High Scalability releases articles about big companies’ architecture (Facebook, Netflix, Auth0...), the issues they face, and how they tackle them in unusual ways. You can read about how Uber Goes Unconventional, What Happens When You Press Play? on Netflix, or how Google is addressing cascading failure.
Our top 3 newsletters to subscribe
- Faun.dev for a full DevOps week-end
Among the few newsletters Faun.dev sends, two are focused on DevOps topics: the #Kaptain one (every Saturday), about Kubernetes, Docker, and Distributed Systems, and the #DevOpsLinks one (every Sunday) about DevOps, SRE, and Cloud Computing. Both of them include the week’s top stories on the web, top tools on GitHub, and top discussions going on. Faun.dev also releases their articles on their blog, you might want to check it out.
- Medium Daily Digest for a customized newsletter
The famous blog has a great supply of DevOps articles about many technologies, from Kubernetes to GCP and AWS, Terraform, Gitlab… The great thing about the Medium Daily Digest is the customized content: you can choose your own topics to be included in your newsletter so it’s not limited to one subject only.
- Kubeweekly.io to keep yourself updated on Kubernetes
Vital if you are working with Kubernetes, this weekly newsletter is sent either on Wednesday or Thursday and summarises everything you need to know about new releases, tutorials, and tools around the wide topic of Kubernetes.
Our top 3 Twitter accounts to follow
- @CloudNativeFdn, a great overview of the DevOps world
You may already know the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a neutral actor founded in 2015 to promote the cloud-native ecosystem and open-source technologies such as Kubernetes and Prometheus. As a central entity, following their Twitter account is a good way to have an overview of the DevOps world, actors, and news.
- @learnk8s for the last updates on Kubernetes
The account tweets everything you need to know about Kubernetes’ new releases and publishes very helpful content such as how to be more productive with Kubernetes.
- @OpenShift for the last updates on OpenShift
Red Hat, the editor of OpenShift, Ansible, and many more products, is very active on Twitter. The OpenShift account is very useful to have easy access to the latest updates, releases, or bugs you may face on the OpenShift tools.
Though we didn’t mention them all, there are many more interesting blogs, newsletters and Twitter accounts about DevOps if you take the time to scrutinize the web. Easier to say than to do, but if you are looking to maximize your article-reading / podcast-listening time we have a little trick called Pocket, an app to save the content you’re interested in so you can access it offline whenever you want when you’re commuting for instance.
Of course, you can also follow our blog, Twitter account, and our newsletter where we give a lot of tips on DevOps technologies.
What about you, where are you taking your news from? Feel free to share your sources with us!