The Syntasso team is often asked for platform engineering book recommendations at conferences, via social media, and in Slack DMs. There’s typically a lot of agreement within the team around the best platform engineering books, but the ranking can be controversial! We’ve pooled together our collective top five recommendations for this blog post.
So, without further ado, here are our 2024 recommendations for the top five platform engineering books (in no particular order)!
Platform Strategy: Innovation Through Harmonization
By Gregor Hohpe
This book offers a comprehensive guide to designing and implementing scalable platforms that can adapt to the inevitable increasing demands (and change requests) of operating in an enterprise context.
Gregor is a seasoned software and platform architect. In this book, he delves into the strategic and practical aspects of building platforms that efficiently support multiple products and services. Key concepts include architectural decisions, governance models, and the challenges of balancing standardisation and innovation.
This book is essential for platform engineers to understand how architectural choices underpin successful platform strategies. This helps to facilitate better decision-making and enables the implementation of robust, scalable infrastructures. It's particularly useful for those looking to align their technical strategies with broader business objectives, which comes from another of Gregor’s excellent books, “The Software Architect Elevator.”
Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
By Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
"Team Topologies" offers a practical, model-based approach to organising teams within software development. The book’s strategies focus on creating team interactions that promote faster software delivery and build more cohesive systems within an enterprise. The language of “stream-aligned teams”, “enabling teams”, “complication subsystem teams”, and “platform teams” that originated from this book is now mainstream across start-ups and enterprises alike.
For platform engineers, understanding these dynamics is vital for designing teams that can effectively manage and evolve the technical platforms supporting their businesses. It’s an excellent resource for anyone looking to refine team structure to enhance software delivery speed and quality.
Infrastructure as Code: Dynamic Systems for the Cloud Age
By Kief Morris
This book is essential for understanding the principles and practices of managing and provisioning infrastructure through code. Kief Morris explores how to use cloud technology to treat physical servers, virtual machines, and other infrastructural elements as software entities, allowing for automated setups, configurations, and maintenance. He provides practical advice on using popular tools and frameworks to implement infrastructure as code (IaC) at all levels of the stack.
This book is essential reading for platform engineers who want to master the automation of infrastructure, which is crucial for creating efficient, scalable, and stable software delivery pipelines and environments. It is an indispensable resource for anyone creating, scaling, or managing cloud-based infrastructures.
Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
By Betsy Beyer, Jennifer Petoff, Chris Jones, and Niall Richard Murphy
This book introduced Google’s pioneering approach to Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), which merged software engineering with IT operations tasks to create highly reliable and automated systems. The collection of essays and articles by multiple Google engineers provides real-world insights into building and maintaining systems that can handle millions of users and immense computational workloads. Topics covered include automation, monitoring, design for scalability, configuration management, and disaster response.
Platform engineers will find this book invaluable for understanding how to apply software engineering principles to operational challenges and learning how to enhance system reliability and operational efficiency.
Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations
By Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim
This book provides a research-backed examination of how DevOps practices impact high-performing technology organisations. It explores the capabilities that influence software delivery performance and organisational culture, which are crucial for effective platform engineering. The work by Dr Forsgren and the team has since evolved into the annual publication of “The Accelerate State of DevOps Report” from the DORA team.
The insights from Accelerate will help platform engineers understand how to implement practices that drive faster and more reliable delivery of software and services.
Bonus: The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
By Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford
This novel is a great introduction to the DevOps culture, from which platform engineering takes many cues. The book contains an interesting narrative that focuses on the digital transformation of a fictional company by addressing IT inefficiencies through DevOps practices. If you’ve worked within the software industry for more than five years (particularly in an enterprise context), I can almost guarantee you’ll be nodding along to this book – you may even recognise a “Brent” (or two) in your organisation.
What are your favourite platform engineering books?
As mentioned above, the Syntasso team is often asked for platform engineering book recommendations at conferences, via social media, and in Slack DMs. If you have any suggestions or disagree with our recommendations, please let us know in person or via the Interwebs!