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DevOps Movement Emerges

2008 to 2009.Software.Paradigm shift.Date precision, year.Evidence grade, secondary.3 primary sources

Drivers:

Performance improvementCost reductionUser demand

Web-scale companies needed faster deployment. Cloud computing enabled infrastructure automation. Agile's benefits stopped at deployment boundaries.

DevOps is about developers and IT operations working together instead of separately. Before DevOps, developers wrote code and 'threw it over the wall' to operations to deploy. This caused problems and delays. DevOps uses automation so code can be tested and deployed quickly and reliably, sometimes many times per day.

DevOps Movement Emerges event plate

Structured atlas record showing date, domain, evidence grade, source count, and predecessor and successor links.

Event plate: DevOps Movement Emerges Convergence-divergence layout. The central hero card carries the event year, type, title, evidence grade, domain and era band. 0 predecessor cards on the left feed in with red arrows labelled "absorbs". 0 successor cards on the right derive with red arrows labelled "spawns". Key terms below the hero pin the vocabulary the event introduced. EVENT PLATE Source: computerhistory.org 2008 - PARADIGM SHIFT DevOps Movement Emerges secondary evidence Domain: AI and machine learning Era band: E6 AI-scale systems KEY TERMS - VOCABULARY THE EVENT INTRODUCED DevOps CI/CD infrastructure as code automation Convergence-divergence: predecessors absorbed, successors spawned Hero card carries year, evidence and domain. 0 predecessors flow in from the left; 0 successors flow out to the right. Key termsbelow pin the vocabulary the event introduced.

Forecasts and counterfactuals stay labelled as opinion in the event data. Source: Computer History Museum.

Before

Development and operations teams worked in silos. 'Throwing code over the wall' led to deployment failures. Manual deployments were error-prone and slow. Agile improved development but not deployment.

What changed

DevOps emerged as a movement to integrate development and operations. It emphasised automation, continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD), infrastructure as code, and shared responsibility. DevOps dramatically reduced deployment times and improved reliability.

How it happened

The term 'DevOps' emerged from discussions at the 2008 Agile Conference and the first DevOpsDays in Ghent (2009). Patrick Debois organised DevOpsDays after discussions with Andrew Shafer. The movement drew on lean manufacturing, agile, and the CALMS framework (Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, Sharing).

Outcomes

  • Enabled continuous deployment (multiple deploys per day)
  • Infrastructure as code became standard
  • Broke down dev/ops silos
  • Spawned SRE and platform engineering

Limitations

  • Cultural change is harder than technical
  • Not all organisations suited for high velocity
  • Tool proliferation can overwhelm teams
  • Security sometimes neglected (DevSecOps response)

Lessons learnt

  • Automation enables reliability and speed
  • Culture change requires leadership support
  • Shared ownership reduces blame
  • Feedback loops span development and operations

Stakeholders and artefacts

Organisations

  • DevOpsDaysopen_source_communityConference series

Individuals

  • Patrick DeboisOrganiser, IndependentOrganised first DevOpsDays, coined term
  • Gene KimAuthor, IT RevolutionPhoenix Project, DevOps Handbook author
  • Jez HumbleAuthor, VariousContinuous Delivery book co-author

Artefacts

  • DevOpsmethodologyIntegration of development and operations
  • CI/CDmethodologyContinuous Integration and Continuous Deployment
  • Infrastructure as CodemethodologyManaging infrastructure through version-controlled code

Key terms

DevOpsCI/CDinfrastructure as codeautomationdeployment

Causality

Preceded by: Agile Manifesto Published.

Made possible: Microservices Architecture Defined; Kubernetes Released: Container Orchestration Standard.

On this course

Read in the path Software Development: Waterfall to DevOps.

Sources

1Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis. "The DevOps Handbook". IT Revolution Press, 2016-10.reputable
2"DevOpsDays Ghent 2009". devopsdays, 2009-10.reputabledevopsdays.org/events/2009-ghent/
3Jez Humble, David Farley. "Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation". Addison-Wesley, 2010.reputable