Preface

At the beginning of 2016, I published The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BJ4V66M). It took me a long time to finish it. Much longer than I imagined.

I started by writing blog posts in TechnologyConversations.com (https://technologyconversations.com/). They become popular and I received a lot of feedback. Through them, I clarified the idea behind the book. The goal was to provide a guide for those who want to implement DevOps practices and tools. At the same time, I did not want to write a material usable to any situation. I wanted to concentrate only on people that truly want to implement the latest and greatest practices. I hoped to make it go beyond the "traditional" DevOps. I wished to show that the DevOps movement matured and evolved over the years and that we needed a new name. A reset from the way DevOps is implemented in some organizations. Hence the name, The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BJ4V66M)

As any author will tell you, technical books based mostly on hands-on material do not have a long time span. Technology changes ever so quickly and we can expect tools and practices that are valid today to become obsolete a couple of years afterward. I expected The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit to be a reference for two to three years (not more). After all, how much can things change in one year? Well, Docker proved me wrong. A lot changed in only six months since I made the book public. The new Swarm was released. It is now part of Docker Engine v1.12+. Service discovery is bundled inside it. Networking was greatly improved with load balancing and routing mesh. The list can go on for a while. The release 1.12 is, in my opinion, the most significant release since the first version that went public.

I remember the days I spent together with Docker engineers in Seattle during DockerCon 2016. Instead of attending the public sessions, I spent four days with them going through the features that will be released in version 1.12 and the roadmap beyond it. I felt I understood all the technical concepts and features behind them. However, a week later, when I went back home and started "playing" with the new Docker Swarm Mode, I realized that my brain was still wired to the way the things were working before. Too many things changed. Too many new possibilities emerged. It took a couple of weeks until my brain reset. Only then I felt I truly understood the scope of changes they introduced in a single release. It was massive.

In parallel with my discovery of the Swarm Mode, I continued receiving emails from The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BJ4V66M) readers. They wanted more. They wanted me to cover new topics as well as to go deeper into those already explored. One particular request was repeated over and over. "I want you to go deeper into clustering." Readers wanted to know in more detail how to operate a cluster and how to combine it with continuous deployment. They requested that I explore alternative methods for zero-downtime deployments, how to monitor the system more efficiently, how to get closer to self-healing systems, and so on. The range of topics they wanted me to cover was massive, and they wanted it as soon as possible.

Hence, I decided to start a new book and combine my amazement with Docker 1.12 with some of the requests from the readers. The DevOps 2.1 Toolkit was born, and, more importantly, The DevOps Toolkit Series came into existence.