History of DevOps
History of DevOps
The genesis of DevOps comes from an increasing need for innovation on the systems side of technology work. The DevOps movement inherits from the Agile System Administration movement and the Enterprise Systems Management (ESM) movement.
ESM, which arose in the mid-2000’s, provided the original impetus of “Hey, our methodology of running systems seems to still be in a pretty primitive state despite years of effort. Let’s start talking about doing it better.” John Willis, whurley, and Mark Hinkle from Zenoss were involved in that, and sponsored a BarCamp around the concept. I think during this phase, initial enchantment with ITIL as a governance framework was largely overthrown for the “ITIL Lite” Visible Ops approach, as well as a shift from being “large vendor” focused – used to be, the enterprise frameworks like HP, IBM, and CA were the only meaningful solutions to end to end systems management, but more open source and smaller vendor stuff was coming out, including Spiceworks, Hyperic, Zenoss, and others.
Also in 2008, the first Velocity conference was held by O’Reilly, focusing on Web performance and operations, which provided a venue for information sharing around operations best practices. In 2009 there were some important presentations about the developer/operations collaboration at large shops (most notably Flickr) and how that promoted safe, rapid change in Web environments. Provisioning tools like Puppet and Chef had strong showings there. More people began to think about these newer concepts and wonder how they might implement them.
Somewhat in parallel, as agile development’s growth in the development space was reaching its most fevered pitch and moving from niche to common practice, this turned into thinking about “Agile Systems Administration” especially in Europe. Gordon Banner of the UK talked about it early on with this presentation. A lot of the focus of this movement was on process and the analogies from kanban and lean manufacturing processes to IT systems administration. Then in 2009, Patrick Debois from Belgium and Andrew “Clay” Shafer from the US met and started talking up (and coined the term) DevOps, and then Patrick held the first DevOpsDays event in Ghent that lit the fuse. The concept, now that it had a name, started to be talked up more in other venues (I found out about it at OpsCamp Austin) including Velocity and DevOpsDays here in the US and spread quickly.
In Patrick Debois’ view, DevOps arose as a reaction against the silos and inflexibility that were resulting from existing practices, which probably sounds familiar. Here’s a good piece by John Willis on the history of the DevOps movement that deconstructs the threads that came together to create it.
DevOps emerged from a “perfect storm” of these things coming together. The growing automation and toolchain approach fed by more good monitoring and provisioning tools, the need for agile processes and dev/ops collaboration along with the failure of big/heavy implementations of ITSM/ITIL – they collided and unconsciously brought together all three layers of what you need for the agile movement (principles, process, and practices) and caught fire. Since then it has developed further, most notably by the inclusion of Lean principles by many of the thought leaders.
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