As development has accelerated in the past 20 years, the role of operations has changed drastically. How does any one individual stay relevant with the increased complexity in systems and services? This practical guide helps anyone in operations-sysadmins, automation engineers, IT professionals, and site reliability engineers-understand the essential concepts of the role today. The collaboration, automation, and evolution of the systems in use has changed how we do operations work. Author Jennifer Davis, senior cloud advocate at Microsoft, provides examples to help you progress your current skills to modern practices. You’ll understand the operations path from version control to production and identify areas of work where you need to upgrade your skills. Topics include: Development and testing: Version control, fundamentals of virtualization and containers, testing, and architecture review Deploying and configuring services: Infrastructure management, networks, security, storage, serverless, and release management Scaling administration: Monitoring and observability, capacity planning, log management and analysis, and security and compliance