The Unicorn Project

The Phoenix Project wowed over a half-million readers. Now comes the Wall Street Journal Bestselling The Unicorn Project! “The Unicorn Project is amazing, and I loved it 100 times more than The Phoenix Project…”—FERNANDO CORNAGO, Senior Director Platform Engineering, Adidas “Gene Kim does a masterful job of showing how … the efforts of many create lasting business advantages for all.”—DR. STEVEN SPEAR, author of The High-Velocity Edge, Sr. Lecturer at MIT, and principal of HVE LLC. “The Unicorn Project is so clever, so good, so crazy enlightening!”––CORNELIA DAVIS, Vice President Of Technology at Pivotal Software, Inc., Author of Cloud Native Patterns This highly anticipated follow-up to the bestselling title The Phoenix Project takes another look at Parts Unlimited, this time from the perspective of software development. In The Unicorn Project, we follow Maxine, a senior lead developer and architect, as she is exiled to the Phoenix Project, to the horror of her friends and colleagues, as punishment for contributing to a payroll outage. She tries to survive in what feels like a heartless and uncaring bureaucracy and to work within a system where no one can get anything done without endless committees, paperwork, and approvals. One day, she is approached by a ragtag bunch of misfits who say they want to overthrow the existing order, to liberate developers, to bring joy back to technology work, and to enable the business to win in a time of digital disruption. To her surprise, she finds herself drawn ever further into this movement, eventually becoming one of the leaders of the Rebellion, which puts her in the crosshairs of some familiar and very dangerous enemies. The Age of Software is here, and another mass extinction event looms—this is a story about rebel developers and business leaders working together, racing against time to innovate, survive, and thrive in a time of unprecedented uncertainty...and opportunity. “The Unicorn Project provides insanely useful insights on how to improve your technology business.”—DOMINICA DEGRANDIS, author of Making Work Visible and Director of Digital Transformation at Tasktop ——— “My goal in writing The Unicorn Project was to explore and reveal the necessary but invisible structures required to make developers (and all engineers) productive, and reveal the devastating effects of technical debt and complexity. I hope this book can create common ground for technology and business leaders to leave the past behind, and co-create a better future together.”—Gene Kim, November 2019

***Over a half-million sold! And available now, the Wall Street Journal Bestselling sequel The Unicorn Project*** “Every person involved in a failed IT project should be forced to read this book.”—TIM O'REILLY, Founder & CEO of O'Reilly Media “The Phoenix Project is a must read for business and IT executives who are struggling with the growing complexity of IT.”—JIM WHITEHURST, President and CEO, Red Hat, Inc. Five years after this sleeper hit took on the world of IT and flipped it on it's head, the 5th Anniversary Edition of The Phoenix Project continues to guide IT in the DevOps revolution. In this newly updated and expanded edition of the bestselling The Phoenix Project, co-author Gene Kim includes a new afterword and a deeper delve into the Three Ways as described in The DevOps Handbook. Bill, an IT manager at Parts Unlimited, has been tasked with taking on a project critical to the future of the business, code named Phoenix Project. But the project is massively over budget and behind schedule. The CEO demands Bill must fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill's entire department will be outsourced. With the help of a prospective board member and his mysterious philosophy of The Three Ways, Bill starts to see that IT work has more in common with a manufacturing plant work than he ever imagined. With the clock ticking, Bill must organize work flow streamline interdepartmental communications, and effectively serve the other business functions at Parts Unlimited. In a fast-paced and entertaining style, three luminaries of the DevOps movement deliver a story that anyone who works in IT will recognize. Readers will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they'll never view IT the same way again. “This book is a gripping read that captures brilliantly the dilemmas that face companies which depend on IT, and offers real-world solutions.”—JEZ HUMBLE, Co-author of Continuous Delivery, Lean Enterprise, Accelerate, and The DevOps Handbook

Increase profitability, elevate work culture, and exceed productivity goals through DevOps practices. More than ever, the effective management of technology is critical for business competitiveness. For decades, technology leaders have struggled to balance agility, reliability, and security. The consequences of failure have never been greater―whether it's the healthcare.gov debacle, cardholder data breaches, or missing the boat with Big Data in the cloud. And yet, high performers using DevOps principles, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Etsy, and Netflix, are routinely and reliably deploying code into production hundreds, or even thousands, of times per day. Following in the footsteps of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook shows leaders how to replicate these incredible outcomes, by showing how to integrate Product Management, Development, QA, IT Operations, and Information Security to elevate your company and win in the marketplace.

Bill has 90 days to fix a behind-schedule IT project, or his entire department will be outsourced. Fortunately, he has the help of a prospective board member, whose "Three Ways" philosophy might just save the day.

This is a companion transcript of the audio series, Beyond The Phoenix Project, intended to be used for reference and to enable further research of cited material, and not as a standalone work. In the audio series, Gene Kim and John Willis present a nine-part discussion that includes an oral history of the DevOps movement, as well as discussions around pivotal figures and philosophies that DevOps draws upon, from Goldratt to Deming; from Lean to Safety Culture to Learning Organizations.The book is a great way for listeners to take an even deeper dive into topics relevant to DevOps and leading technology organizations.

Summary Cloud Native Patternsis your guide to developing strong applications that thrive in the dynamic, distributed, virtual world of the cloud. This book presents a mental model for cloud-native applications, along with the patterns, practices, and tooling that set them apart. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology Cloud platforms promise the holy grail: near-zero downtime, infinite scalability, short feedback cycles, fault-tolerance, and cost control. But how do you get there? By applying cloudnative designs, developers can build resilient, easily adaptable, web-scale distributed applications that handle massive user traffic and data loads. Learn these fundamental patterns and practices, and you'll be ready to thrive in the dynamic, distributed, virtual world of the cloud. About the Book With 25 years of experience under her belt, Cornelia Davis teaches you the practices and patterns that set cloud-native applications apart. With realistic examples and expert advice for working with apps, data, services, routing, and more, she shows you how to design and build software that functions beautifully on modern cloud platforms. As you read, you will start to appreciate that cloud-native computing is more about the how and why rather than the where. What's inside The lifecycle of cloud-native apps Cloud-scale configuration management Zero downtime upgrades, versioned services, and parallel deploys Service discovery and dynamic routing Managing interactions between services, including retries and circuit breakers About the Reader Requires basic software design skills and an ability to read Java or a similar language. About the Author Cornelia Davis is Vice President of Technology at Pivotal Software. A teacher at heart, she's spent the last 25 years making good software and great software developers. Table of Contents PART 1 - THE CLOUD-NATIVE CONTEXT You keep using that word: Defining "cloud-native" Running cloud-native applications in production The platform for cloud-native software PART 2 - CLOUD-NATIVE PATTERNS Event-driven microservices: It's not just request/response App redundancy: Scale-out and statelessness Application configuration: Not just environment variables The application lifecycle: Accounting for constant change Accessing apps: Services, routing, and service discovery Interaction redundancy: Retries and other control loops Fronting services: Circuit breakers and API gateways Troubleshooting: Finding the needle in the haystack Cloud-native data: Breaking the data monolith

From tween advocate for limb difference and founder of Project Unicorn Jordan Reeves and her mom, Jen, comes an inspiring memoir about how every kid is perfect just the way they are. When Jordan Reeves was born without the bottom half of her left arm, the doctors reassured her parents that she was “born just right.” And she has been proving that doctor right ever since! With candor, humor, and heart, Jordan’s mother, Jen Lee Reeves, helps Jordan tell her story about growing up in an able-bodied world and family, where she was treated like all of her siblings and classmates—and where she never felt limited. Whether it was changing people’s minds about her capabilities, trying all kinds of sports, or mentoring other kids, Jordan has channeled any negativity into a positive, and is determined to create more innovations for people just like her. Her most famous invention, aptly called Project Unicorn, is a special prosthetic (that shoots glitter!) made with the help of a 3-D printer. A real-life superhero, Jordan is changing the world with her foundation, Born Just Right, which advocates and celebrates kids with differences, and helps them live their best possible life—just like Jordan is today!

Thelma the Unicorn is back and more fabulous than ever! The whole wide world was overjoyed!Her fans all went berserk.But this time Thelma had her friendand that's what made it work.The world misses its favorite unicorn, but Thelma is reluctant to don her horn and sparkles again. However, with the support of her best friend Otis, she realizes the importance of spreading love and joy -- no matter what people think.Bestselling author Aaron Blabey's sweet and funny follow-up to Thelma the Unicorn will have young readers cheering for Thelma and Otis as they learn to love who they are... even if they don't have sparkles.