"DevOps History"

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  • How did DevOps actually start?

    The DevOps movement grew out of the Velocity Conference, which Jesse Robbins cofounded with Steve Souders in 2007. The term "DevOps" itself didn't exist until Patrick Debois coined it two years later, in 2009. Jesse went on to cofound Chef, the open-source tools that put infrastructure as code into practice.

Articles and mentions

SiliconANGLE

5 Pivotal Documents in the Evolution of the DevOps Movement

Klint Finley's 2012 canon of DevOps. The Agile Manifesto, Tim O'Reilly's Operations piece, my 'Operations is a Competitive Advantage' post from 2007, John Allspaw's 10 Deploys talk, and Jay Lyman's analyst report.

“Operations is a Competitive Advantage (Secret Sauce for Startups!)”

— Jesse Robbins (cited document)
IT Revolution

The Convergence of DevOps

John Willis's history of how DevOps came together: Agile Infrastructure, Velocity, and Lean Startup as the three threads that converged.

O'Reilly Radar

Velocity: The Art of Web Operations

Tim O'Reilly's note opening Velocity 2009 tells the origin story: Steve Souders, Andy Oram, and I asked for a conference for our community. Two years in, 700 people showed up.

O'Reilly Radar

Operations Is a Competitive Advantage (Secret Sauce for Startups!)

My 2007 O'Reilly Radar argument that operations is a competitive advantage for startups, and occasionally a strategic weapon. Comments thread includes Luke Kanies, John Allspaw, John Willis, and Steve Loughran.

O'Reilly Radar

You Become What You Disrupt

What happens when a disruptive technology wins a platform play and inherits the obligations of the system it replaced? I wrote this on O'Reilly Radar in 2007. The questions are still open.

“You become what you disrupt. What changes occur when you win a platform play, when you go from disruptive technology to a public utility?”

— Jesse Robbins