The DevOps origin story

It seems like the DevOps movement started in a blog comment thread.

It’s hard to imagine that back in the early 2000s, working in Ops was considered the wrong path to a great engineering career by most engineers and executives. Tim O’Reilly wrote a post in 2006 entitled “Operations: The New Secret Sauce” which felt like the first time a high-profile technology leader truly understood that this was a new engineering discipline, essential to success at internet scale. While I was still exploring what I was going to do after I left Amazon, I had the good fortune to be recruited to write for O’Reilly Radar by my friends Artur Bergman and Brady Forrest.

Brady, Artur, and a few others cornered Tim O’Reilly at FooCamp in 2007 to discuss the idea of a conference dedicated to web performance and operations… and the emerging community around it. A month later at OSCON 2007, a larger group of us met to discuss it in detail. I had said “we need a gathering place for our tribe”, Tim said yes, and Steve Souders and I became the formal co-chairs of what would become the Velocity Conference.

In October 2007, I published “Operations Is a Competitive Advantage” on O’Reilly Radar, arguing that operations was a competitive advantage and occasionally a “strategic weapon.” In that thread, Luke Kanies (founder of Puppet) showed up in the comments and introduced me to Adam Jacob, who I would go on to found Chef (much to Luke’s irritation). John Allspaw weighed in from Flickr, John Willis talked about EC2, and many other people who would become leaders in the movement appeared. At the time, the consensus was that our emerging discipline was called WebOps. DevOps wasn’t a term yet, and wouldn’t be for two more years.

Gina Blaber, O’Reilly’s VP of Conferences, organized the roughly 40-person planning summit that followed (the one I facilitated) and moved quickly from there to launch the conference.

Tim wrote a great summary of the Velocity story the week Velocity 2009 opened. That year, John Allspaw and Paul Hammond gave a truly extraordinary talk at Velocity, whose title slide read “Dev❤️Ops”. Patrick Debois was inspired by that session (we all were) and coined and popularized the term “DevOps” which became the name we all organized under. Patrick organized a grassroots community event series called DevOpsDays. Then John Willis, Andrew Shafer, and Damon Edwards organized the first US-based DevOpsDays in Mountain View, the day after Velocity 2010 ended, and it has been growing globally ever since.

A community turned into a movement and many companies and careers and empires have been built by hundreds of thousands of people. Our small tribe became a thriving global ecosystem, and one I am very proud to have helped start, build, and serve.

Right in the middle of all this, John Allspaw and I co-edited Web Operations: Keeping the Data on Time, published by O’Reilly in June 2010, with chapters from Theo Schlossnagle, Justin Huff, Matt Massie, Eric Ries, Adam Jacob, Patrick Debois, Richard Cook, Heather Champ, Brian Moon, Paul Hammond, Alistair Croll, Sean Power, Baron Schwartz, Jake Loomis, Anoop Nagwani, Eric Florenzano, Andrew Clay Shafer, and Mike Christian. In hindsight, it would have been better if we’d made it one of the first DevOps books, instead of the last WebOps one.

Further Reading

• Operations Is a Competitive Advantage — the 2007 O’Reilly Radar post that started it all, with the original comment thread
• Why We Started the Velocity Conference — Tim O’Reilly’s 2013 retrospective on how it began
• Velocity: The Art of Web Operations — Tim O’Reilly’s account written the week Velocity 2009 opened
• Web Operations: Keeping the Data on Time — the O’Reilly book that defined the field
• GameDay: Creating Resiliency Through Destruction — the USENIX talk on the exercises created at Amazon
• Resilience Engineering: Learning to Embrace Failure — ACM Queue, with Kripa Krishnan and John Allspaw
• Meet 2011 TR35 Winner Jesse Robbins — MIT Technology Review on the resilience and infrastructure work
• The Convergence of DevOps — John Willis traces the three threads that created the movement
• Changing Culture & Being a Force for Awesome — the Velocity 2012 talk on culture hacking
• Velocity and DevOpsDays — Ernest Mueller, The Agile Admin, on the two events landing back-to-back in 2010
• Velocity 2008 Conference Experience Wrapup — an outside attendee’s account of the first Velocity
• An Oral History of #HugOps — Protocol’s history of how operations engineers built a culture of empathy