I am a huge supporter for automation, in any of the IT parts and I am personally focused and specialised on automation of Cloud Infrastructure (Most specifically towards AWS). So i was very eager to read the book, as I am always curious on if I could do anything better or learn something new that will make my work or project better.

The book was very nice and in some ways easy to read. The book is very well written and explains things very deeply. Like there are complete chapters about testing and branching models, where all kinds of test strategies are explained in detail. Also about the various kinds of branching models that exist and what the benefits are for these (of course with lot of information why you should choose this or not). I don’t think I have read this in any of the other automation books (yet). And actually to my suprise while reading it (of course later on I was like, yeah I could have expected such a topic) about tracking changes via the appropiate tools when you want to deploy to production. You can not make changes in production when you want to, unless you work with a CI/CD with automatic deploys to production. Mostly you need to have approvals to deploy something on production, which is also nicely described as well.

But, I do have an issue with the Python. I am all for Python, but I think the Python examples to generate the Terraform seems a bit to much and not KISS. I think writing the Terraform code itself is easier to understand and show.

It was a really nice book to read and it made sure to freshen some things that I have done before, I did not actual learn something that I could have used in my day-to-day work. Nevertheless, a decent 7/10.

You can buy the book here on Amazon or on the site of Manning.