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Jay Parekh
Jay Parekh

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History of Devops

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Why this post ?

This article is about how term Devops came to place, who were the pioneers or the maker of whole movement of Devops. Which are key events that helped companies through Devops.
During my engineering days I always use to wonder how the techies came up with such cool tech ideas and its origin/history, out of which many of turned into giants today.
All companies are now moving towards Agile-Devops. So this post is dedicated to pioneers of Devops. (Learned this history during IBM introductory course)
Note: No tools mentioned.

So it begins : Once upon a time ..

Development and Operations two sides of any software development process use to communicate only via tickets in separate teams.

Patrick Debois

DevOps problem

  • 2007 : Patrick Debois got frustrated with Development and Operations - and thought how can they collab.

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  • 2008: In Agile Conference 2008, Andrew Clay Shaefer was speaker of a session “Birds of a feather”, which was attended by a single member - Patrick Debois. Where Andrew and Patrick discussed about the Dev and Ops problem and he showed this famous Slide “Wall of confusion” - Dev needs change and Ops needs stability and they communicate with each other through tickets.

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  • 2009: Starting of Devops Days in Ghent for the first time

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  • 2009: All were surprised by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond reported that they could do 10 deployments in a day (flickr which was bought by Yahoo eventually).

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  • 2013: Jez Humble and David Farley wrote a book called Continuous Delivery . Also I highly recommend and admire the Youtube session by Jez Humble - Continous Delivery

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  • 2013: Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford worked together to write a novel about IT, Devops and Business in conversational and anecdotes style

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  • 2016: Gene Kim ( From The Phoenix Project), Jez Humble (Thoughtworks - Continuous Delivery), Patrick Debois (Coined Devops) and John Willis collaborated and created a Handbook for Devops.

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