Pipeline as Code: Continuous Delivery with Jenkins

Great for automation. Got more than what I expected

This book is legit, period. If you're building microservices for the cloud, and you want to use Jenkins for CI/CD, this book is worth your time and money. Buy it, read it, thank me later. ...That said, it's not for the uninitiated. You may be well out of your depth if you're not already at least somewhat familiar with: Docker, Terraform, Kubernetes, Linux, and networking essentials (CIDR, subnets, DNS, etc.).This book is essentially a long detailed tutorial for Jenkins administration in the cloud. It covers so much ground I can't hope to summarize it all here. The primary focus of the book is Jenkins administration (configuration and operations). The book walks through every stage of designing and deploying a High-Availability Jenkins cluster to the cloud, complete with multiple environments and a complete CI/CD pipeline (fully integrated with GitHub, artifact registries, monitoring, team alerts via Slack/Email, etc.).Beyond Jenkins itself, the 2nd main focus of the book is Terraform. Through the course of the book the author uses Terraform extensively to build out a compete cloud infrastructure (via IaC processes), starting from VPCs with multiple subnets in multiple availability zones, then moving to baking server images (via Packer), managing credentials (IAM/RBAC/SSH/etc.), and then on to building and deploying multiple Dockerized microservices via Jenkins (on top of all that infrastructure). Most of the book focuses on AWS, but he does offer examples for GCP and Azure at various points (and even DigitalOcean, on occasion).The demo app itself is simple (as usual for books like this), but complex enough to be better than most books of this nature - it comprises 3 main services (one in Python, Go, and Node), with an Angular client and a MongoDB store as well. No app code is developed in the book, but the examples serve to demonstrate how to integrate with the build tools and workflows of those various platforms (which is enough for you to generalize the examples to Java/Ruby/React/etc. as you may see fit).It's a weighty book at 492 pages, but about 40% of that is actually screenshots and code samples, so it reads faster than you'd expect. I am often critical of books that pad pages with gratuitous screenshots, but this one is the rare example where I found almost every single image or code sample to be clear, helpful, and appropriate.A couple counterpoints, to be fair:1) I do have to say that the author does almost nothing to introduce Swarm or Kubernetes (a chapter each in the 2nd half). His usage and sample code for each is great, in my view, but prior knowledge is definitely assumed – so if you don't already have a handle on those you should get it before reading those chapters.2) As above, same goes for the chapter on Serverless (Lambda). All 3 chapters are good, but they'll make a lot more sense if you're not new to these technologies.3) This book may also frustrate readers who prefer theory to tactics - while he starts out at a high level, most of the book is really down in the weeds of implementation and deployment, step by step.I'll wrap up by saying that I read a _lot_ of tech books, and most don't really deliver. This book does, and I am seriously glad I bought it. While it doesn't quite get you to a fully production-ready *hardened* infrastructure, it gets pretty darn close (much closer than most similar books). The author offers countless helpful tips and techniques around security (ssh/RBAC/etc.), scalability, monitoring, alerts, and other real-world considerations.One last note of praise: much of the material in the book around Terraform, Packer, and setting up IaC in the cloud can be repurposed for anyone deploying any kind of complex app or service to the cloud. Anyone building anything needs networking, machine images, security, etc. - and this book shares volumes of great examples that could benefit anyone working on cloud tech of almost any variety.Final word: This book is a deep dive into Jenkins, CI/CD, and Cloud IaC. If you want to really get your hands dirty and learn how to build out Jenkins pipelines for cloud microservices, this book is for you.