books

New eBook on Continuous Delivery with Windows and .NET

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Back in 2010 when Jez Humble and Dave Farley wrote their ground-breaking book Continuous Delivery, the Windows and .NET platforms lagged behind the Linux/Mac world in terms of automation capability. That is no longer the case – every core feature in Windows and .NET now has a PowerShell API and all the core tooling needed for Continuous Delivery – package management, artifact repositories, build servers, deployment pipelines tools, infrastructure automation, monitoring,and logging – are all now available natively on Windows/.NET.

Chris O’Dell (@ChrisAnnODell) and I decided we should explain how to make Continuous Delivery work with Windows and .NET, and thanks to the great editorial team at O’Reilly, we’ve published a short eBook:

The dedicated book website is at CDwithWindows.net and O’Reilly have published the first chapter of the book online as an article: Introduction to Continuous Delivery with Windows. We’d love your feedback: book@cdwithwindows.net

UPDATE: we’ll be at both PIPELINE Conference (March 23 2016) and WinOps Conference (May 24 2016) with printed copies of the book.

Note: we began writing the book in August 2015, and it’s astonishing (and exciting!) how much has changed in the 8 months since then, with Windows Nano, Azure and Windows support for Docker and containers, .NET Core, SQL Server on Linux, and even SSH for Windows. These and more recent developments do not feature in the book – perhaps we’ll do an updated version soon.

Continuous Delivery eBook from Zend – views from 29 authors

Posted on August 29, 2014August 28, 2014 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

I was recently asked to contribute to an eBook from Zend about moving to Continuous Delivery (CD). The 29 authors in the book share a wide range of experience with CD, and there is plenty of useful advice; the contributions from Mathias Meyer (@roidrage), Kate Matsudaira (@katemats), and Jamie Ingilby (@jamiei) are particularly worth reading, I think.

In my section of the book I explain how using ThoughtWorks GO to model the testing and release steps (effectively part of the value stream) we won trust from several different people and teams during a move to CD. Using a prototype also helped us to validate the activities undertaken:

We tried to empathize with their situation and, using role-based security in the deployment pipeline, uncovered enough information to give them a sense of visibility and control.

Without being able to visualise and communicate easily the activities we were automating, progress would have been slow or even blocked.

Get a free copy of the eBook here: http://bit.ly/ZendCDbook

Using Chef for infrastructure automation – reading list

Posted on August 28, 2014August 28, 2014 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

I have recently read (and re-read) several books on Chef in order that I can recommend books to clients who are starting with infrastructure automation (and to remind myself of the more obscure uses of knife, encrypted databags, and so on). In this post I comment on these books:

Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook by Matthias Marschall
Managing Windows Servers with Chef by John Ewart
Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef (2nd Edition) by Stephen Nelson-Smith
Automation Through Chef Opscode by Navin Sabharwal and Manak Wadhwa

Summary: read Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook for a good introduction to Chef on both Linux and Windows; read Managing Windows Servers with Chef if you manage many Windows machines; but most of all read Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef because without a test-driven approach your infrastructure code will rapidly become tangled, unsupported, and obsolete.

Continue reading Using Chef for infrastructure automation – reading list

Experience Reports Book on Continuous Delivery and DevOps – ‘Build Quality In’

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Continuous Delivery and DevOps are difficult. In many organisations the creation of an automated deployment pipeline is impeded by significant technology challenges, and encouraging Development and Operations teams to work together can seem impossible.

In order to help teams adopt and sustain Continuous Delivery and DevOps, Steve Smith and I decided to put together a book of experience reports – Build Quality In – with contributions from fellow practitioners in these fields.

We have a growing list of really excellent contributors, and we are using LeanPub and its ‘lean’ publication model to make available the content as soon as each chapter is ready – no ‘big bang’ releases! The book is available to buy now on LeanPub, and updates will be made throughout the summer of 2014, with all chapters expected to be ‘done’ by September 2014.

70% of royalties from the book will be donated to the UK non-profit organisation Code Club, which inspires kids to learn how to use computers to build software systems. We wanted to support an organisation that is active in engaging and shaping future engineers (both female and male), and Code Club is doing a great job.

We’re excited to be working with so many talented people on this book, which we hope will become a useful resource for people working in a Continuous Delivery or DevOps context.

Resources

Roundup: Patterns for Performance and Operability

Posted on October 7, 2013October 7, 2013 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

I recently posted a review of Patterns for Performance and Operability by Ford et al on the SoftwareOperability website. I think that this book is exceptionally useful in its treatment of both performance and operability, and anyone who cares about how well software works in Production should buy and read a copy (there are paper and eBook editions).