DevOps history

We share the story of DevOps with the words of Damon Edwards, the developer and one of the organizers of DevOpsDays in the United States. Watch the 10-minute video in English from the link or read our translation under the cut.

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Hi, I'm Damon Edwards. Between my work at DTO Solutions and writing articles for the IT Revolution, I communicate with a bunch of dudes who are interested in DevOps. Talking with them gave me an idea: everyone is discussing what DevOps is, but nobody knows where it came from. I told about it repeatedly, so I decided to get together and record it on video. Here is a brief history of DevOps, well, or as I think I found it.
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Worlds dev and ops

The story begins in Belgium 2007th with a guy named Patrick Debois. Patrick had an interesting goal: he wanted to explore IT from all angles. Patrick was a consultant, but he chose vacancies to work in every IT industry.

One day, he took up a government project to move a huge data center. Patrick was responsible for testing, and he had to run a lot between the development group (dev groups) and the maintenance service (ops groups). This contrast between the work of developers and minetenans always upset Patrick, but on this project especially. Therefore, one day he worked in the rhythm of a flexible development methodology, and on the other he was already struggling with fire and lived in the unpredictability of daily operation. Patrick knew there must be a better way, but the dev and ops worlds shared miles, and conflicts were everywhere.

Fast forward to Toronto 2008, the conference Agile. [Former programmer] Andrew Schaefer posted on the wall the idea of ​​a BoF session “flexible infrastructure” for people with a similar opinion about dev and ops. Only one person came to the event, and yes, you guessed it, it was Patrick Debois. Even Andrew missed his own session. There was almost no feedback, and he decided that it was not interesting for anyone to fight the gap between development and operation. But Patrick came to the conference with a presentation on the use of Scrum and other flexible methodologies within the Agile model. He was very excited that someone else shared his opinion. Patrick tracked down Andrew in the conference room, and they had a long discussion. In the end, Patrick and Andrew decided that they should have like-minded people, because the problem seemed widespread and systematic.

Now a little context. Within Agile’s broader community of agile methodologies, continuous integration was gaining popularity and moving the community more towards deployment, but there was almost nothing that could bridge the gap with exploitation. Therefore, Andrew and Patrick decided to form the Agile Systems Administration in Google Groups. There were some interesting conversations, but the traffic remained quite low.

DevOpsDays

We turn to 2009, when John Allpow and Paul Hammond worked together at Flickr. On June 23, at O'reilly's Velocity onference in San Jose, they presented their now-famous report “10-plus deploys per day: dev and ops cooperation at Flickr”. Patrick was at home in Belgium and watched a stream of lectures. This is it - Patrick realized - just the topic he raved about. On Twitter, Patrick lamented how he would like to visit Velocity, but Paul Nasser wrote, they say, Patrick, why don’t you run your Velocity in Belgium, we could all attend, isn't it cool, haha.

For Patrick, this joke has become an obsession. And after a while, he tweeted the announcement of a meeting of developers and system administrators in Ghent on October 30-31, 2009. Patrick understood that an event needed a name, and it was obvious to include “Dev” and “Ops” in it. It was also a two-day conference, and for some reason Patrick liked the DoD acronym (reminded him of dead on delivery). So the name DevOpsDays appeared.

Maybe it was a good schedule of trains or something else, now we do not know, but the crowd of progressive system administrators, developers, managers and system programmers was impressive. They come from all over the world to participate in DevOpsDays. Of course, when the event ended, everyone rushed scattered around their corners of the globe, but the twitter discussion continued.

Using the full name as a hashtag - #DevOpsDays - has become burdensome. "Days" was thrown out so as not to spend as much as 4 of 140 valuable symbols on it. And the DevOps hashtag really caught on.

Speaking of distribution, Lindsay Homewood liked the idea of ​​DevOps so much that he brought it with him to Sydney and created his first DevOpsDays. Andrew Schaefer and John Willis, we got together, established contact with Stefan Apits and Daniel Francisco on LinkedIn and conducted the first DevOpsDays in the USA, immediately after the 2010 Velocity. But at the same time, something more interesting was happening.

DevOps goes to Enterprise

Inspired by the driving force of previous meetings, caring people suddenly showed up all over the world to share experiences and discuss ideas under the new DevOps banner.

DevOps became a lightning rod for people who had something to say about work in the industry: how it was built and what it should be. Presentations, meetings at other conferences - this was a continuation of the online movement, that stream of tweets and blog posts in which people shared their experiences and learned from others. When the parody songs and music videos appeared, it became clear that DevOps is hurt. It was already formed a mass movement, quite rare in the field of IT. It was still strongly ignored by vendors, analysts, most of the traditional enterprise IT-shops, but the movement grew, feeding on the passion of those who were not indifferent. These people, in the past, web developers, wrote a lot on DevOps in their spare time and discussed at the meeting. They really sympathized with the cultural and functional weaknesses of the classical instruments with which they had to work.

In response, the DevOps community has launched a new generation of tools that have formalized the best practices. The tools had funny names like puppet, chef, vagrant, juju, rundeck, logstash, fpm (you can only guess what f represents in fpm). But these were serious tools, much more efficient than legacy tools. They were peculiar artifacts of the community, symbolizing the best method of work and the formalization of thinking about new ideas and new processes. But for the uninitiated, these were new, sparkling toys: they were jealous, they were talked about. But the enthusiasm for these tools was a power. Very soon, experienced analysts began to realize that, hey, something interesting is going on here, maybe we should join the discussion.

At first it was such dudes as Michael Koet from Red Monk, Jay Lyman from The 451 Group. And then Cameron Height from Gartner. He had a very interesting impact: subtle, but potentially significant in DevOps and Enterprise relationships. I can't prove it, but timing is curious. In March 2011, Cameron inserts a slide into the presentation, and sends a strong signal to Enterprise IT stores and vendors that serve them. He declares to this day unheard of in the DevOps movement.

Cameron says that by 2015, DevOps will evolve from a niche strategy interesting by large cloud providers to a mainstream one used by 20% of Global 2000 organizations. I do not know if you speak the language of analysts, but the rough translation is “DevOps real, check it out”. Some may be confused about the prophecy about 20% - it’s too optimistic or too conservative, but that’s not the point. The main thing is a clear message: DevOps goes to Enterprise, put it on him.

Coincidence or not, but soon after, almost all the major vendors finally turned their attention to DevOps and began to dilute their communication with them. Some understood how to use it, others did not understand the essence at all. The main thing is that DevOps began to appear everywhere, and that's fine. Even we at DTO have noticed a surge of interest in Enterprise around the same time. Suddenly large well-known web companies, which generally cannot be called hipsters, became interested in DevOps. That's when DevOps crossed the chasm on the way to the mainstream.

What does the DevOps story teach us?

So why is this story so important, why am I so interested in it and gossip about the origins of DevOps? I believe the old adage: if you don’t know where you come from, you will never know where you are going. And this story reminds us of several important things in DevOps.

First, DevOps invented practices, not vendors or analysts. We already knew that if a vendor or an analyst tries to assign a message or push through products / ideas that are undesirable to people, the community will find out how to get around it.

Secondly, the story reminds us that DevOps is not a thing, not a product, not a specification, not a standard, and not the name of the work. DevOps is the voice of the community, a movement based on experience. This is a story about caring people who gather and share what works and does not work, collaborate to become better and help companies for which they work.

Another story reminds us that DevOps is decentralized and open to all. Share your experiences or ask questions to other members of the community - you are always welcome. So this movement began, so it continues.

Speaking of continuation, what happened next with DevOpsDays? They continued to appear all over the world: organized communities, open, free or almost free. These personal meetings have become a real core of the movement, they bring in life and interest. If you want to hang out with the best devopserami on the planet, visit DevOpsDays. If you see Patrick Debois at this or other similar meeting, please give him five, buy a beer, say thank you. But it is not necessary to wait for a real event, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, the discussion on DevOps continues online — get involved and share new experiences.

So I see the story of DevOps, although many people and events could not be mentioned for the sake of time. I hope no one is offended. I tried to show the general concept, and not to tell about each individual contribution. I'm Damon Edwards from DTO, thank you for your attention.