Reading: DevOps for the desperate

That's my first post in a new series where I "review" books. The idea was born out of thought that I've forgotten most of the books that I've read. So this blog post might not be beneficial to you at all (the real audience is me in the future). It's a strictly selfish endeavor. But then again, isn't publishing anything ultimately a self-seeking act?

Full title of the book is DevOps for the Deseprate: A Hands-On Survival Guide. What I was promised to learn?

• How to use Vagrant to provision virtual machines
• How to use Ansible to manage configuration
• Containerization with Docker
• Orchestration with Kubernetes
• Observability and monitoring with Prometheus and Graphana
• Troubleshooting and debugging in Linux

To put it briefly it was not worth reading. I din't expect much, and that expectation was met. Most of the topics I already knew on the level described in the book, and it's not a deep level of expertise knowledge. There are no any new ideas presented in the book. Only a few patterns that I was already using but really wasn't aware of the name.

The text (polish translation) was really hard to read. Dull at times. But I guess that's not the translator's fault, but rather the underlying material. It feels like a "Quickstart" page from the online docs, only worse. If I ever write a book in the future, I should study this one carefully.

One thing worth noting, though: at work, we use multi-stage builds, but I wasn't aware it's a named pattern. A multi-stage build is a technique when you use multiple FROM instructions in a single Dockerfile. One stage is for building an app and the other is for production. This way, the final image is lightweight and without unnecessary bloat.