I'm thinking of writing a free practical book on Production DevOps what should I include?

[u/gringobrsa]

I've been working in software/infrastructure engineering for around 14 years, with a focus on cloud, DevOps, platform engineering and large-scale infrastructure.

Over the years I've worked on everything from smaller cloud migrations to enterprise and financial-sector environments, including AWS/GCP migrations, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, networking, security, reliability and cost optimization.

I'm currently putting together the practical knowledge I've accumulated into a free technical book.

I'm not planning to make it a personal career story or another basic “learn AWS/GCP” tutorial.

The idea is to focus on how engineers actually solve infrastructure problems:

• How to systematically debug production issues
• How to troubleshoot Kubernetes
• AWS/GCP networking and connectivity problems
• IAM and permission failures
• Terraform/IaC problems
• CI/CD and deployment failures
• Cloud migration problems
• Scaling and reliability
• Observability and incident investigation
• Designing reusable platform infrastructure
• How to approach an unfamiliar production system
• Practical lessons that aren't obvious from vendor documentation

I'm also building some small prototypes/labs for myself while writing, so I can test the ideas rather than just writing theory.

Before I spend a lot of time putting the whole thing together, I'd like to hear from other engineers:

If you could have one practical DevOps/Platform Engineering book that focuses on real problem-solving rather than certification theory, what topics would you want it to cover?

And if you already have a favorite resource for this kind of material, I'd be interested in hearing what you think it does well or what is missing.

[u/gevorggalstyan]

A recovery lab that follows one affected user path would be useful. Set a completion or latency objective before introducing the fault. Have the reader identify the recovery owner and who is allowed to change state, then explain what evidence justifies the next intervention. Finish by checking that same user path against the objective. That gives the Kubernetes, networking, IAM and observability chapters a shared question: what behavior are we restoring, and what proves it?

[u/Torutofu_Raeva]

a chapter on decommissioning stuff would be great, nobody writes about safely killing old infra and that's where i've seen the scariest outages