How did Jesse Robbins start the DevOps movement?

Jesse Robbins co-founded the O’Reilly Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference in 2007, which became the gathering point for practitioners who were independently discovering the same thing: the wall between software development and IT operations was the single biggest bottleneck in shipping reliable software.

Drawing on his experience managing availability at Amazon — where he’d seen firsthand what happens when dev and ops teams don’t communicate — he helped codify the practices and cultural principles that became known as DevOps: breaking down silos, automating infrastructure, treating operations as a software problem, and replacing blame with learning. The idea that a failed deployment should trigger a blameless postmortem rather than a search for someone to fire was radical at the time.

Velocity brought together the people who would go on to define the movement — and gave it a name, a community, and a shared body of knowledge. Jesse’s role was both as a practitioner who had lived these problems and as a community builder who created the space for others to share what they were learning. He went on to co-found Chef, which put the “infrastructure as code” part of DevOps into practice as open-source software.