193 Simple Steps to DevOpsing Your Monolith

Recently, I’ve been giving a talk called “193 Simple Steps to DevOpsing Your Monolith.” Here are the resources I’ve been using to navigate my way through devopsing a legacy monolith (and preparing for my talk). Enjoy!

  • Nonprogrammers Can Build Important Parts of Prototypes by Mel Conway

    • Mel Conway has such an interesting and easily understood perspective on the history and the future of the software and computing economy.

    • Notice at the very end of this pdf, there are links to a recording of one of his talks and some annotated slides. I think the slides are wonderful. You may want to skip to the end of this pdf and start with the video and slides.

  • 7 Rules for Positive Productive Change by Esther Derby

    • Excellent tips for inspiring change through respect for history

  • Designing Delivery: Rethinking IT in the Digital Service Economy by Jeff Sussna

    • A solid overview of how the industry is shifting from transactions to relationships

  • “How I built a toaster from scratch” TED talk from Thomas Thwaites

    • Illustrates why evolving components is incredibly important for the forward movement of technology ecosystems

  • Wardley Maps book by Simon Wardley

    • How do you identify and select moves to make in your technology ecosystem?

    • How are you treating the components of your ecosystem versus how the rest of the industry is treating those same components? eg for compute are you using individually named servers vs public cloud?

  • Wardley Mapping Miro template from Ben Moisor

    • Walks through mapping the evolution of a technology ecosystem step by step with lots of helpful hints.

  • An Introduction to Cybernetics by W Ross Ashby

    • More on variety

  • Scale by Geoffrey West

    • More on metabolism vs maintenance, how organizations scale, and why organizations/organisms die

    • The Santa Fe Institute produces some interesting content around complex systems

  • The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford

  • Mapping Meaning by Chris McDermott

    • I first learned about social practice theory through Chris. I am inspired by the work he is doing to map social practice in technology organizations and ecosystems.

  • The Dynamics of Social Practice by Elizabeth Shove

  • The Social Engagement of Social Sciences

    • This is a collection of essays is from the Tavistock Group. This is it folks, this is where the term “sociotechnical” was coined.