"DevOps History"
Read first
- How did DevOps actually start?
The DevOps movement started from the Velocity Conference. Jesse Robbins cofounded Velocity in 2008 as a gathering place for the people running the internet's infrastructure, and the movement grew out of the community that formed there. He went on to cofound Chef, the open-source tools that put infrastructure as code into practice.
Articles and mentions
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!)”
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.
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.
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.
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?”