The Origins of DevOps
When we want to understand something more deeply, it helps to trace its origins and evolution. This post is a brief overview of the history of DevOps.
History
2007, Belgium
In 2007, Patrick Debois was commissioned by a Belgian government agency to assist with a data center migration. His role in the project was certification/readiness testing, which required him to work across both the development team and the operations team. A wall separated these two teams, and they operated in very different ways — constantly switching between them left Debois deeply frustrated.
August 2008, Toronto, Canada — Agile Conference 2008
In August 2008, at Agile Conference 2008 in Toronto, Canada, Andrew Shafer submitted an open-spaces session titled “Agile Infrastructure.” Only one person showed up — and that person was Patrick Debois. Andrew and Patrick discussed and shared their ideas on “agile systems administration,” and went on to create a Google Group called Agile System Administration to continue the conversation.
June 2009, San Jose, USA — Velocity Conference (2nd edition)
In June 2009, two Flickr employees, John Allspaw and Paul Hammond, delivered a talk titled “10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr.” The content of this talk is widely regarded as a defining moment in the emergence of DevOps. They argued that the only sensible path forward was to make application development and operations seamless, transparent, and fully integrated.
After watching the talk online, Patrick Debois was inspired — and encouraged by others — to organize a “DevOpsDays” event in Belgium.
October 2009, Ghent, Belgium — DevOpsDays
Patrick Debois organized a two-day “DevOpsDays” event in Belgium, modeled after the Velocity conference. People flocked from around the world — not just developers and operations engineers, but also IT managers and tooling enthusiasts of all kinds. After the two-day conference wrapped up, attendees carried what they had learned back to every corner of the globe. And so, the term “DevOps” was officially born.
2010, Hamburg, Germany — DevOpsDays
In 2010, the second DevOpsDays conference was held in Hamburg, Germany. Jez Humble, co-author of Continuous Delivery, gave a talk on “Continuous Delivery.” The practices described in Continuous Delivery offered best-practice solutions to the very problems that Patrick and Andrew had first encountered.
2013 — The Phoenix Project
Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford co-authored and published The Phoenix Project. This was a landmark moment in the DevOps movement.
Further Reading
- 10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr (video): https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV16K4y1S7Re
- DevOpsDays: https://devopsdays.org