How the DevOps movement started

I cofounded the O’Reilly Velocity Conference with Steve Souders (the full story of how it started, and how the term “DevOps” came along two years later, is in The DevOps Origin Story). Velocity 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.

Practices like continuous delivery and infrastructure as code were first articulated and debated at Velocity. The conference gave the movement a name and a community.

I went on to cofound Chef, which put the “infrastructure as code” part of DevOps into practice as open-source software. Chef gave every team the same infrastructure automation capabilities that had been closely guarded secrets at Google and Amazon.

DevOps is maturing. The principles are now embedded in how the best engineering organizations work: automation, shared ownership, and the discipline of learning from failure rather than blaming individuals for it. The next chapter is AI developer tools, where the same cultural and technical shifts are happening again.

Further reading

• Operations Is a Competitive Advantage — the 2007 post that started it all
• The DevOps Origin Story — the full thread, recovered from 179 archived pages
• Why We Started the Velocity Conference — Tim O’Reilly’s account
• Changing Culture and Being a Force for Awesome — Velocity, 2012
• The Rise of DevOps — InfoQ, 2013
• DevOps Is Dead? Nope, It Is Maturing — Confident Commit, 2023