Brief History of DevOps
Patrick Debois
Patrick Debois often called “The Father of DevOps”.
When Patrick Debois realised Dev and Ops weren’t collaborating well, DevOps really got underway in 2007. He wondered if there was a better way.
Agile Conference 2008
The next year, at the 2008 Agile Conference, Andrew Clay Shafer created a birds of a feather meeting (BoF) to talk about “Agile Infrastructure”. Shafer didn’t think anybody would come, so he did not show up to his own meeting.
Patrick Debois showed up and Patrick went looking for Andrew because he wanted to talk about Agile infrastructure being the solution to get operations to be as Agile like the developers were. This is where DevOps got started.This is where DevOps got started.
10+ Deploy per Day
In 2009 at the Velocity Conference, John Allspaw gave a talk about “10 plus deploys per day — Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr,” and the idea started gaining traction.
This talk made people take notice of what was possible by adopting these early DevOps practices.
First DevOpsDays
Also in October of 2009, Patrick Debois, held the first DevOpsDays conference in Ghent, Belgium. It was described as, “The conference that brings development and operations together.”
This is where the term “DevOps” was first used.
Currently, DevOpsDays is a regional conference that takes place abroad multiple times a year in various cities..
Continuous Delivery 2010
In 2010, Jez Humble and David Farley wrote a groundbreaking book called Continuous Delivery that sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high-quality, valuable new functionality to users using a technique called Continuous Delivery.
Through automation of the build, deploy, and test process, along with improved collaboration between developers, testers, and operations, delivery teams can release changes in a matter of hours — sometimes even minutes — no matter the size of a project or the complexity.
The book is over 10 years old, but it still has a lot of great concepts that helped changed a lot of people’s thinking about how to perform software delivery in a continuous fashion.
The Phoenix Project 2013
In 2013, Gene Kim, along with Kevin Behr and George Spafford published The Phoenix Project, a book based on Elijah Goldratt’s book, The Goal.
The Goal is about a manufacturing plant that is about to go under and what they had to do to bring it back to life. It is a story about lean manufacturing principles.
The Phoenix Project is about an information technology (IT) shop in a company that is about to go under and what it took to bring it back to life.
This story is about applying lean manufacturing principles to software development and delivery.
DORA 2015
In 2015, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Gene Kim, and Jez Humble founded a startup called DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) that produced what are now the largest DevOps studies to date called the State of DevOps Report.
Nicole Forsgren was the CEO and is an incredible statistician. Through this research, she found that taking an experimental approach to product development can improve your IT and organizational performance and that high-performing organizations are decisively outperforming their lower-performing peers in terms of throughput.
The research shows that undertaking a technology transformation initiative can produce sizeable cost savings in any organization. If you haven’t read this year’s State of DevOps report, I strongly urge you to do so.
The DevOps Handbook 2016
The DevOps Handbook was published in 2016. It was written by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis as a follow-on to The Phoenix Project and it serves as a practical guide on how to implement the concepts that were introduced in that book.
John Willis, by the way, worked at Docker and Chef back then, and is a DevOpsDays coordinator after being at the original DevOpsDays in Ghent 2009 with Patrick Debois.
If you only read one DevOps book, this is the book to read. They looked at companies that have adopted DevOps and document what did work and what did not work. It’s a great read.
2019
Over the past ten years, there have been 40 DevOpsDays events in 21 countries, and it is growing. Patrick Debois was the lead for DevOpsDays from its inception in 2009 until 2015 and then Bridget Kromhout became the lead in 2015.
Bridget Kromhout is also the co-host on the very popular podcast, Arrested DevOps. She is heavily involved with the DevOps community. She stepped down in 2020 but stayed on the advisory board of DevOpsDays.
These are some of the major influential people in the early DevOps movement: Patrick Debois, Andrew Clay Shaffer, John Allspaw, Jez Humble, Gene Kim, John Willis, Bridget Kromhout, and Nicole Forsgren.
They weren’t the only ones but they went out and made a difference. They showed us how DevOps can be impactful. They explained that it is all about changing culture, not just about tools. They explored measurements and the idea of changing how you work. These are the early pioneers.
