Infrastructure as Code: Managing Servers in the Cloud

I found this book to be very informative as I am trying to shift from manual operations experience into automated operations. Another thing that I really appreciated while reading this is I never saw the words "X subject matter is outside the scope of this book." Whenever a casual reference was made to a topic that wasn't intended to be discussed in detail, a footnote was provided that referred me to a more specfic text, video or blog site.

Infrastructure as Code shows modern techniques to use the cloud. The beginning chapters detailed the differences between the "Iron Age" of infrastructure and newer cloud based methods. Scripts are shown often to show how you would actually setup some cloud based instances. The author has a preference for Ruby and AWS.The middle portions of the book look at design patterns related to the cloud. Often "anti-patterns" are explored as well to show what not to do. Templating servers and configuration management is detailed.Part III of the book was basically a summary of DevOps. I found the information to be too general here, and sometimes not that relevant to Infrastructure. To give an example, the author discusses Code Reviews where he says: "All too often, code reviewing becomes a wasteful activity that doesn't lead to improvements actually being made to code. Pair programming is more rigorous, with input from two people leading to better design and improvements made in real time."The author often states opinions like this, but does not back them up by anything but his opinion. There was no evidence provided to show that code reviews are wasteful, while pair programming boosts productivity. Maybe this has been the case for the author, but I would have liked to seen more evidence for a lot of his claims. A lot of the asides in the book were taken from the author's personal experiences and used to prove something.I found the stronger parts of the book where the author shows configurations and details. Parts in which the author relied on personal experiences and generalizations were not as good. Overall though, this was an informative book that is helping define the new rules for cloud based architectures.

Although it’s not possible to write one book that covers all aspects of agile and dynamic IT-infrastructure, this book touches on all areas and gives a good hand down about how to go about automation (opposed to just scripting manual tasks).

I would give this book to all the project manager and guys with control of the budgets. Explains the rationale of why IT needs to put key pieces in play and collaborate across departments.

Clear explanations and examples. There concepts are important.

This is well-written and provides a good overview of some of the concepts (benefits and high level methods) of defining your infrastructure in text files, but honestly I didn't get anything out of this book. I do security at a company where we use AWS and have one devops guy doing everything, so I decided to try to learn a little more about what he does. This book did not help me. I already knew that defining what servers you have in text files that can be checked into git is a good thing. I already knew that saving your configurations for how these servers should be set up is a good thing. I was hoping to learn more about best practices at a more technical level, but this book is too high level for that.

I like the whole book but I expect that it more deep in the knowledge of IaC.

Clearly defines Infrastructure as code, why we need it and how to get there! Examples of the types of tools, best practices and principles!