DevOps is, by far, the closest thing we have to a software factory at the time of this writing. We had dedicated a whole issue to DevOps in January 2020, but this month’s topic makes it a natural object of interest. The analogy goes so deep that even the word “pipeline” fits into the world of DevOps like a glove.
Hence, this month’s Vidéothèque entry is “The (Short) History of DevOps” by Damon Edwards, a 12-minute video published in September 2012, explaining the early memories of DevOps and how it evolved from 2009 to then. Pay attention to the release date of this video: we are talking about DevOps before Terraform, Docker containers, or Kubernetes.
The video explores the origins and evolution of the DevOps movement, documenting how it transitioned from a niche frustration into a globally recognized IT buzzword. Damon aims to clarify the often-misunderstood roots of DevOps, highlighting key individuals, conferences, and community efforts that shaped its decentralized development. The most important part here is to understand that no individual vendor took part in the creation of DevOps; this is quite an important point.
So the history begins in 2007 in Belgium with a certain Patrick Debois, who experienced deep frustration at his job (we can all relate to him here) due to the constant friction and conflicting workflows between agile development teams (“Dev”) and traditional operations (“Ops”) while working on a data center migration. This disconnect led to a pivotal moment at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto, where Andrew Clay Shafer proposed a session on “agile infrastructure” (minute 01:34) that nobody attended. Like, literally nobody, except for Patrick. Their resulting conversation spawned a Google group, but the true turning point occurred during the 2009 O’Reilly’s Velocity conference, when John Allspaw and Paul Hammond delivered a famous presentation on “Dev and Ops cooperation” at Flickr, as explained at minute 03:03.
Stuff went fast from that point. Inspired by the Velocity presentation, Patrick Debois organized a local gathering in Ghent, Belgium, in late 2009 to bring developers and systems administrators together, named “DevOpsDays,” a term that was quickly shortened to the hashtag “#DevOps” by attendees wanting to save character space on Twitter (minute 04:42). Somehow, this sparked a global community out of nowhere, leading to more face-to-face meetings in places like Australia and the United States and eventually causing the movement to cross the chasm into mainstream adoption.
In just 3 years, from 2009 to 2012, DevOps became the definitive software factory concept: a set of best practices and activities, mindsets, and (yes) rituals so that software could be put into production not just 2 times a year but potentially 20 times per hour, with better quality and less friction. Ah, the dream.
DevOps is, then, an experience-based, grassroots movement created by practitioners, for practitioners (minute 09:21). It was never designed as a rigid standard, a specific product, or a corporate job title imposed by vendors. Keep that in mind the next time you get to use the Azure DevOps Server console for your project. No, Microsoft did not come up with the name or the concept.
Watch “The (Short) History of DevOps” by Damon Edwards on YouTube.
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