Sysinit Press is the publishing arm of sysinit, drawing on twenty years of building and operating production systems on Linux. We write field-tested guides for engineers who operate production infrastructure, the kind of book we wanted on the shelf and went ahead and wrote.
The first title from Sysinit Press: a production field guide written and kept current by the engineers who use it.
Containers, Orchestration, and Observability with Podman.
The practitioner's guide to running containers in production with Podman: its daemonless, rootless architecture, systemd and Quadlet orchestration, health checks and self-healing, and observability with OpenTelemetry.
Every title picks up where the getting-started guides stop. Five things hold across the imprint.
Every book is written by engineers who run the thing in production, so the guidance survives contact with a real deployment.
We assume you know the basics and go straight to the operational detail: orchestration, security, observability, and failure modes.
Every edition ships as PDF and EPUB with a runnable examples archive. You buy it once, and it stays on your own drive.
Our books track the tools they cover. When an upstream release changes the guidance, we update the book to match.
Are these books written by AI? No. We will not publish a book on a topic we are not experts in. The ideas, the draft, the experience from using the covered components daily, the contents and practical exercises, and the troubleshooting sections come from us. AI then helps us at every step of turning that material into a publishing-ready book. We describe that pipeline in the post on the toolchain behind the Podman book.
Podman in Production is the first. Others are underway on the subjects we work in every day: Linux infrastructure, automation, and AI systems.
The Agentic Terminal
Early Access
Offline Stack
In progress
Digital Sovereignty
In progress
Herding Agents
In progress
Backups in Production
Planned
OpenSSH in Production
Planned
systemd in Production
Planned
The Neovim Book
Planned
The tmux Book
Planned
FreeBSD for Linux Professionals
Planned
The Proxmox Book
Planned
OpenZFS on Linux and FreeBSD
Planned
rsync in Depth
Planned
curl and libcurl
Planned
OPNsense Firewall & Router
Planned
Linux Servers in Production
Planned
VPNs in Production
Planned
nginx in Production
Planned
Git in Depth
Planned
PostgreSQL: More Workloads, Fewer Systems
Planned
Zsh in Depth
Planned
The Agentic Terminal is available in early access: the current draft as PDF and EPUB for 39 USD, with every new build until release; the price rises to 49 USD at release. We announce every other title once it reaches its final draft. You pick the order in the poll below.
Twenty-one titles are announced, four of them in progress. Pick the book you want to read first. Your vote helps decide the writing order; the standings appear after you vote.
Sysinit Press publishes our own work today. If you are writing in this space, Linux, infrastructure, automation, or AI, we are open to a conversation about publishing it together.