Jeroen is the author of Enterprise DevOps for Architects, we got the chance to sit down with him and find out more about his experience of writing with Packt.
Q: What is/are your specialist tech area(s)?
Jeroen: (Enterprise) Architecture for (Multi)Cloud, DevOps, Security, AI
Q: How did you become an author for Packt? Tell us about your journey. What was your motivation for writing this book?
Jeroen: In 2020 I already published the first book at Packt: Multi-Cloud Architecture and Governance. That covered cloud architectures for Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and VMware. Working in/with cloud technology typically involves DevOps. So, this book was sort of a logical follow-up. I noticed in projects that architects often don’t seem to know how to architect for DevOps projects, what it involves. Especially when things like Site Reliability Engineering, AIOps, and DevSecOps come into play. A lot of enterprises are looking into this, which means that (enterprise) architects have to know about this and how to incorporate this in their architectures.
Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Jeroen: This book – as the previous one – is mainly written from my own experience. Next, I did read a number of books on the topics myself. All in all, it took me around 6 months to find out what topics I wanted to discuss in the book.
Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?
Jeroen: The only challenge that any tech writer will find is that it’s extremely hard to keep up with all the developments, also in Dev(Sec)Ops. You blink your eye twice and something has changed again, already. That goes specifically for tooling, therefore I tried to stay away from tooling in the book as much as possible and really focused on the architecture. However, there are quite some (industry standard) tools mentioned.
Q: What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?
Jeroen: DevOps is here to stay. The current speed of businesses – of any business – demands it, because their customers demand it. They need to develop faster than ever before. Only one way to get this done: through DevOps. You build it, you run it. But: enterprises also need fine-grained observability of processes. And they need to keep control of costs. That’s where automation and AIOps come in. Lastly, it needs to be secure from scratch: from the moment a developer pulls code from a repository to the push to production. So, automation driven by AI and security will become more and more important in DevOps.
Q: Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?
Jeroen: This book really focuses on architects. It’s not a book that provides code. This book will guide you through the lines of thinking on how to set up DevOps, AIOps, and DevSecOps.
Q. What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away from the book with?
Jeroen: Automate, automate, automate. There’s no other way to gain the necessary speed, whilst keeping costs down and controllable. Yet, security should be intrinsic in every single step.
Q. What advice would you give to readers learning tech? Do you have any top tips?
Jeroen: Read. And try stuff out. Get a free tier account in a cloud and just start trying things. As long as you’re not in a production environment of an enterprise, no harm can be done. It’s the only way to learn tech. Read and do.
Q. Do you have a blog that readers can follow?
Jeroen: ….That would be LinkedIn, I’m afraid.
Q. What are your favorite tech journals? How do you keep yourself up to date on tech?
Jeroen: I read so many journals and blogs. First of all the blogs of all major clouds. But my favorite one is the blog by Corey Quinn, in which he weekly reflects on developments in AWS – with a great deal of humor. Really awesome.
Q. How would you describe your author journey with Packt? Would you recommend Packt to aspiring authors?
Jeroen: Packt has great teams that help you along the whole process of writing. As an author, you are never on your own. The support is really amazing, from the first idea to writing the synopsis and eventually the actual production of the chapters.
Q. How did you organize, plan, and prioritize your work and write the book?
Jeroen: I have a daytime job at Philips, so that means that most of the writing – at least 90 % – has to be done during the evenings, nights, and weekends. But the result is ever so rewarding!
Q. What is the one writing tip that you found most crucial and would like to share with aspiring authors?
Jeroen: Just start. Really.
You can find Jeroen’s book on Amazon by following this link click.
