The main reason I wanted to read this book was because of the writer, Julien Vehent, who leads the Firefox Operations Security team at Mozilla, and is responsible for the security of Firefox’s high-traffic cloud services and public websites. For me personally, Mozilla is one of the technology companies that puts people before profits and has a very important mission: to keep the internet open and accessible to all. Besides that, I am also very interested in Linux and standard DevOps practices like CI, CD, and unit testing, which are listed as required prior knowledge to be comfortable with before reading this introductory book that "reviews the latest practices used in securing web applications and their infrastructure and teaches you techniques to integrate security directly into your product". While these requirements and the fact that Manning describes it as an introductory book might seem a little bit contradictory, they are just trying to state that you need some prior hands-on experience with CI/CD and unit testing and should be familiar with the Linux command line.
This has allowed the author to skip a lot of introductions that would not be needed in my case, but it does assume that you are also familiar with at least the Cloud and Agile Software Development as well, and have some ideas about what Security adds to DevOps.
The book itself is split up in three main logical parts, being: "Case study: applying layers of security to a simple DevOps pipeline", "Watching for anomalies and protecting services against attacks" and "Maturing DevOps security". The first part starts with a description on building a barebones DevOps pipeline, and then moves on to describes the four layers of security it advocates in this book: protecting web applications, protecting cloud infrastructures, securing communications and securing the delivery pipeline. The second part is split up in four closely related but separate chapters: collecting and storing logs, analyzing logs for fraud and attacks, detecting intrusions and the Caribbean breach: a case study in incident response. These chapters are pretty essential primers on their topic with regards to Security in my opinion, and very well-described and detailed. The third part is filled with food for thought and recommendations, and consists of chapters about: assessing risks, testing security and continuous security.
The back cover of the book summarizes this the best for me, so I'm quoting that here: "This experience-rich book is filled with mission-critical strategies to protect web applications against attacks, deter fraud attempts, and make your services safer when operating at scale". And as Andrew Bovill from Next Century stated it, this is "An amazing resource for secure software development - a must in this day and age - whether or not you’re in DevOps." I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone with a remote interest in DevOps, or even when you only just started out on modern day software development or cloud deployments, as this might be one of the best books that you can get on the subject right now!