After the success of “The Phoenix Project,” Gene Kim returns with “The Unicorn Project,” another engaging novel that drives home critical lessons about DevOps, site reliability engineering (SRE), and the importance of creating a culture of continual learning and improvement in IT organizations.

Rebellion in the Ranks

The story follows Maxine, a senior lead developer and architect at a company struggling with many of the same IT challenges depicted in The Phoenix Project. Despite the company’s success with implementing DevOps practices from the Phoenix Project, there are still pockets of resistance and outdated ways of working. Maxine ends up being recruited to work on a secret “unicorn” project that aims to create a cloud-based business disruption before the competition beats them to it.

As Maxine and her renegade crew work against the clock and battle through bureaucratic inertia, technical debt, and other roadblocks, the book dives deep into advanced DevOps concepts. This includes the critical role of SRE in ensuring system reliability and resilience, the importance of observability and monitoring, and the need to foster a generative culture of psychological safety and continuous improvement.

Mastering Site Reliability Engineering

One of the book’s biggest strengths is how it makes the complex world of SRE accessible through the narrative. Readers get to see SRE principles in action as Maxine’s team implements practices like chaos engineering, blameless postmortems, error budgets, and game days to proactively identify and fix vulnerabilities before they impact customers.

The book also highlights the cultural and organizational changes required to truly embrace SRE, such as creating collaborative teams with shared ownership, implementing robust automated testing and deployment practices, and fostering a learning environment where failures are treated as opportunities rather than reasons to assign blame.

A Worthy Sequel

While “The Unicorn Project” can stand on its own, it’s an excellent follow-up to “The Phoenix Project” that takes the DevOps journey to the next level. The book is a must-read for anyone looking to understand how to build and enable reliable, resilient, and secure systems at scale.

Through the lens of an engaging story, it provides invaluable insights into SRE along with a broader perspective on nurturing a generative organizational culture that empowers teams, enables continual learning, and unlocks innovation. DevOps professionals and IT leaders will find this book both enjoyable and packed with wisdom to help them on their own transformational journey.