After watching this video, you will be able to:
List key examples of DevOps growth that occurred from 2007 to 2019,
and summarize the contributions of key influential people in the growth of DevOps.
I’d like to take you through a brief history of some significant events in the early DevOps
movement and point out who the key influencers were.
DevOps really started in 2007 when Patrick Debois recognized that Dev and Ops were not
working well together.
He wondered if there was a better way.
The next year, at the 2008 Agile Conference, Andrew Clay Shafer created a birds of a feather
meeting (BoF) to talk about “Agile Infrastructure”.
Shafer didn't think anybody would come, so he did not show up to his own meeting.
Patrick Debois showed up and Patrick went looking for Andrew because he wanted to talk
about Agile infrastructure being the solution to get operations to be as Agile like the developers
were.
This is where DevOps got started.
Then in 2009 at the Velocity conference, John Allspaw gave a talk about “10 plus deploys
per day - Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr,” and the idea started gaining traction.
This talk made people take notice of what was possible by adopting these early DevOps
practices.
Also in October of 2009, Patrick Debois, often called “The Father of DevOps,” held the
first DevOpsDays conference in Ghent, Belgium.
It was described as, “The conference that brings development and operations together.”
This is where the term "DevOps" was first used.
DevOpsDays is now a local conference held internationally several times a year in different
cities.
In 2010, Jez Humble and David Farley wrote a groundbreaking book called Continuous Delivery
that sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery
of high-quality, valuable new functionality to users using a technique called Continuous
Delivery.
Through automation of the build, deploy, and test process, along with improved collaboration
between developers, testers, operations, delivery teams can release changes in a matter
of hours—sometimes even minutes—no matter the size of the project or the complexity.
This book is over 10 years old, but it still has a lot of great concepts that helped changed
a lot of people's thinking about how to perform software delivery in a continuous fashion.
In 2013, Gene Kim, along with Kevin Behr and George Spafford published The Phoenix Project,
a book based on Elijah Goldratt’s book, The Goal.
The Goal is about a manufacturing plant that is about to go under and what they had to
do to bring it back to life.
It is a story about lean manufacturing principles.
The Phoenix Project is about an information technology (IT) shop in a company that is
about to go under and what it took to bring it back to life.
This story is about applying lean manufacturing principles to software development and delivery.
In 2015, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Gene Kim, and Jez Humble founded a startup called DORA (DevOps
Research and Assessment) that produced what are now the largest DevOps studies to date
called the State of DevOps Report.
Nicole was the CEO and is an incredible statistician.
Through this research, she found that taking an experimental approach to product development
can improve your IT and organizational performance and that high-performing organizations are
decisively outperforming their lower-performing peers in terms of throughput.
The research shows that undertaking a technology transformation initiative can produce sizeable
cost savings in any organization.
If you haven't read this year’s State of DevOps report, I strongly urge you to do so.
The DevOps Handbook was published in 2016.
It was written by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis as a follow-on to
The Phoenix Project and it serves as a practical guide on how to implement the concepts that were
introduced in that book.
John Willis, by the way, worked at Docker and Chef back then, and is a DevOpsDays coordinator
after being at the original DevOpsDays in Ghent 2009 with Patrick Debois.
If you only read one DevOps book, this is the book to read.
They looked at companies that have adopted DevOps and document what did work and what
did not work.
It's a great read.
Over the past ten years, there have been 40 DevOpsDays events in 21 countries, and it
is growing.
Patrick Debois was the lead for DevOpsDays from its inception in 2009 until 2015 and
then Bridget Kromhout became the lead in 2015.
She is also the co-host on the very popular podcast, Arrested DevOps.
If you don't listen to it, you should.
I have learned a lot from listening to Bridget.
She is heavily involved with the DevOps community.
She stepped down in 2020 but stayed on the advisory board of
DevOpsDays. It is a great event.
I got to attend DevOpsDays in New York City in March of 2020, and I loved every minute
of it.
These are some of the major influential people in the early DevOps movement: Patrick Debois,
Andrew Clay Shaffer, John Allspaw, Jez Humble, Gene Kim, John Willis, Bridget Kromhout, and
Nicole Forsgren.
They weren’t the only ones but they went out and made a difference.
They showed us how DevOps can be impactful.
They explained that it is all about changing culture, not just about tools.
They explored measurements and the idea of changing how you work.
These are the early pioneers.
Why is the history important?
It is important because DevOps was a grassroots effort started by people like Patrick Debois,
who just wanted to eliminate the roadblocks in software delivery and figure out how can
development and operations work better together.
Damon Edwards, who co-hosted a podcast with John Willis called the 'DevOps Cafe', said
it best in his talk on “The (Short) History of DevOps” way back in 2012.
DevOps is from the practitioners, by practitioners.
It’s not a product, a specification, or job title.
It is an experience-based movement, that is decentralized and open to all.
People were beginning to realize that DevOps was a better way to work.
In this video, you learned that: Patrick Debois started the DevOps movement
in 2007 with a simple idea of getting development and operations to work better together.
DevOps grew through the efforts of influential people such as Patrick Debois, Andrew Shafer, John Allspaw,
Nicole Forsgren, Bridget Kromhout, Jez Humble, Gene Kim, and John Willis.