The origin of DevOps

DevOps is a new movement that officially started in Belgium in 2009, when a group of people met at the first DevOpsdays conference, organized by Patrick Debois, to discuss how to apply some agile concepts to infrastructure. Agile methodologies transformed the way software is developed. In a traditional waterfall model, the product team would come up with specifications; the design team would then create and define a certain user experience and user interface; the engineering team would then start to implement the requested product or feature, and would then hand off the code to the QA team, who would test and ensure that the code behaved correctly, according to the design specifications. Once all the bugs were fixed, a release team would package the final code, which would be handed off to the technical operations team, to deploy the code and monitor the services over time:

The increasing complexity of developing certain software and technologies showed some limitations with this traditional waterfall pipeline. The agile transformation addressed some of these issues, allowing for more interaction between the designers, developers, and testers. This change increased the overall quality of the product, as these teams now had the opportunity to iterate more on product development. However, apart from this, you would still be in a very classical waterfall pipeline, as follows:

All of the agility added by this new process didn't extend past the QA cycles, and it was time to modernize this aspect of the software development life cycle. This foundational change with the agile process which allows for more collaboration between the designers, developers, and QA teams, is what DevOps was initially after, but very quickly, the DevOps movement started to rethink how developers and operations teams could work together.