The DevOps origin story

The DevOps movement started in a blog comment thread.

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. Luke Kanies showed up in the comments and introduced me to Adam Jacob. John Allspaw weighed in from Flickr. John Willis talked about EC2. The people who would build the movement were already arguing about infrastructure before anyone called it DevOps.

Tim O’Reilly had written “Operations: The New Secret Sauce,” calling operations ground zero in the computing wars. I told Tim that everyone in operations at Amazon printed it out and tacked it to their cubicles. It was the first time a technical leader said what we were doing was new and important. So Steve Souders, Brady Forrest, Artur Bergman, and I walked into Tim’s office and said “we need a gathering place for our tribe.” Tim said yes. That became the Velocity Conference. I had lived the problem at Amazon, where operations teams always missed the launch party because we were too busy in the data center trying to support a launch. Velocity was the answer: bring the practitioners together and let the ideas compound.

They compounded fast. By 2009, John Allspaw and I were on stage at Velocity laying out the art of web operations. In 2010, we co-edited Web Operations, the O’Reilly book that defined the field, with essays from practitioners at Amazon, Google, and other companies doing this work firsthand. That same year, Patrick Debois, John Willis, Andrew Shafer, and Damon Edwards organized the first US-based DevOps Days in Mountain View, where I participated.

Meanwhile, I had been running GameDay exercises at Amazon since the early 2000s, deliberately injecting failures into production to build organizational resilience. In 2012, I contributed to “Resilience Engineering: Learning to Embrace Failure” in ACM Queue, with Kripa Krishnan from Google and John Allspaw from Etsy, describing how we built organizations that deliberately trigger failure to get stronger.

Luke Kanies’s comment on that 2007 post introduced me to Adam Jacob. That introduction led to Chef. I cofounded Chef to 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. Hundreds of incredible people built that company.

John Willis later traced the three threads that created DevOps and named that 2007 post as one of them.

The community that grew out of Velocity built #hugops, a culture of empathy for the people who keep the internet running, and changed how the best engineering organizations work.

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 account of how it began
• The Art of Web Operations — Jesse and John Allspaw’s Velocity 2009 talk
• 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
• 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
• An Oral History of #HugOps — Protocol’s history of how operations engineers built a culture of empathy