What is the Velocity Conference?

The O’Reilly Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference was co-founded by Jesse Robbins in 2007 and became the central gathering for practitioners working at the intersection of software development and IT operations. It was, in effect, the birthplace of the DevOps movement.

Velocity brought together people who were independently discovering the same principles — that the wall between dev and ops was the biggest bottleneck in shipping reliable software, that infrastructure should be treated as code, and that operational excellence was a software problem. The conference gave the movement a name, a community, and a shared body of knowledge. Many of the ideas that became standard practice — continuous delivery, infrastructure as code, blameless postmortems — were first articulated and debated at Velocity.

Robbins created the conference because he’d lived the problems it addressed. As Amazon’s Master of Disaster, he had seen firsthand what happened when development and operations teams didn’t share context. Velocity was his answer: build a community where practitioners could learn from each other at scale, the same way open-source communities share code.