The History Of DevOps

My first impulse for this inaugural IT Revolution post was to dive into a meaty DevOps topic. But this isn’t that post! That will come later.

Instead, I want to share my first hand account of the history of DevOps.

So much of the drive and unique flavor of the DevOps movement is a direct result of how it came to be.  But despite this, I’ve been surprised by how few people actually know the tale.  This all prompted me to have some fun, channel my inner Al Gore, and record a narrated slideshow.

Send me feedback and I’ll compile the notes for the recording of version 2!

One final note… In addition to being an interesting human story about timing and a confluence of seemingly inevitable ideas, there is an interesting social media angle here. DevOps might just be the first technology movement that was started on and is centered around a Twitter hashtag (#devops). The DevOps Days events provide the movement with repeated bursts of energy, but it’s Twitter that is the constant hub. I’m not sure if it was an essential element or just a sign of the times, but it does seem to give DevOps a unique flavor.

- About The Authors

Damon Edwards

Damon Edwards is Senior Director, Product at PagerDuty. Previously, Damon was a cofounder of Rundeck, the makers of the popular open-source runbook automation platform acquired by PagerDuty in 2020. Prior to Rundeck, Damon was the Managing Partner of DTO Solutions, a DevOps and Operations Improvement Consultancy. Damon has spent the past 23 years working with both the technology and business ends of IT Operations. He is noted for being a leader in porting cutting-edge DevOps techniques to large-scale enterprise organizations. Damon is a frequent conference speaker and writer who focuses on DevOps, SRE, and Operations improvement topics. Damon is active in the international DevOps community, co-host of the DevOps Cafe podcast, and a content chair for Gene Kim’s DevOps Enterprise Summit.

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