A Small Intro to DevOps

DevOps = Development + Operations

What is DevOps? Let’s start with the wikipedia definition:

DevOps is a software engineering culture and practice that aims at unifying software development (Dev) and software operation (Ops). The main characteristic of the DevOps movement is to strongly advocate automation and monitoring at all steps of software construction, from integration, testing, releasing to deployment and infrastructure management. DevOps aims at shorter development cycles, increased deployment frequency, and more dependable releases, in close alignment with business objectives.

Whew, that was a mouthful.

Simply put, it is a culture of collaboration between developers and operations people.

This culture has given rise to set of practices. DevOps is a grassroots movement started by practitioners, for practitioners.

I also want to emphasize what DevOps is NOT.

It is NOT

• set of tools like Jenkins, Ansible, Kubernetes. But tools are essential to devops.
• a standard
• a product
• job title

DevOps is a culture of collaboration between development and operations.

Here is a brief history of how it all started.

DevOps grew out of agile software development.

Agile seeks to develop software in small, frequent cycles so as to deliver functionality quickly and be flexible to changing business needs as opposed to waterfall development. DevOps and agile go hand-in-hand.

In 2007, agile software development was growing popular but this caused friction between development people and ops people because dev guys focused on releasing code more frequently and ops focused on the stability of the entire system.

Patrick Debois, an engineer with experience in both dev and ops was frustrated with this divide. He met Andrew Shafer at Agile2008 Conf in Toronto, Canada.They started online discussion groups to discuss this problem and to devise ways of bridging the divide.

On June 23, 2007 John Allspaw and Paul Hammond gave a breakthrough talk at Velocity Conf “10+ deploys per day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr”. Patrick saw this talk on livestream.

On Oct 30–31, 2009 Patrick hosted the first DevOps day in Ghent, Belgium; a conf for both dev and ops engineers. Twitter was abuzz with #devops.

From there DevOps has continued to grow from the grassroots all over the world.

This small movement has grown so much that it has now:

• become truly mainstream
• spawned many, many tools
• completely changed the IT industry

Look out for more posts from me regarding DevOps.

Thanks for reading!