I’ve been head down for a few years with work and it wasn’t until recently that I took a look at the technologies that have matured and that have been adopted by the DevOps community.

Much has changed.

Things that used to take hours can now be completed in minutes, and these same tasks can be fully automated. This was already happening, but the tools to facilitate this are robust and well-supported.

Based on the communities around these projects, it’s easy to get up and running after reviewing a few tutorials. But since I’m building something important (and I won’t have time to firefight once things are up and running), I decided to buy a few books and take the plunge.

I’m glad I did.

Something that hasn’t changed much in the time that I’ve been doing system administration and server management work is the nature of the posts that are typically published about new technologies.

They’re typically written by:

1. someone who hacked together an inadvisable workaround;
2. someone writing an article for money, often at the expense of important security considerations; or
3. someone with a unique setup (making the post useless for most people)

One huge advantage of reading documentation and official books is that the author of the book is often the creator of the technology.

This is helpful not only because the author benefits from being as clear as possible (a poorly written book is unlikely to get good reviews and be recommended), but they’re incentivized to think through how people will interact with said technologies.