DevOps 101

In the years leading up to the 2009 DevOpsDays conference tour, the term "DevOps" was relatively unknown to the engineering and technology stratosphere. The inception of DevOps-oriented culture was provided by Patrick Debois at an agile infrastructure conference in 2008. During this conference, Patrick spoke of a highly collaborative development team he worked with during his tenure at a large enterprise. The most highly collaborative moments during this tenure were when there were site outages or emergencies. During these incidents, the developers and operations people seemed to be laser-focused and worked incredibly well together. This experience gave Patrick a yearning to encourage this behavior outside of non-emergency activities.

It was at the agile infrastructure conference that Pattick Debois was able to also connect with Andrew Shafer (who then worked at Puppet Labs, Inc.). These two soon found out that they shared many of the same goals and ideologies. In many senses, this chance encounter encouraged Patrick to continue to push the fledgling concept of DevOps forward. In future conferences, Patrick tried fervently yet unsuccessfully (at agile infrastructure conferences) to encourage a more collaborative approach to software development and delivery. While the idea was novel, the practical implementation of the idea never seemed to gain traction at the venues provided to Patrick.

It was in 2009 that Patrick Debois attended an O'Reilly Velocity conference, where he heard John Allspaw speak of how Ops and Dev could collaborate. From this speech, the idea of DevOps was seeded in his mind. Patrick decided to begin hosting a set of mini DevOpsDays conferences, which would eventually catapult the concept of DevOps into mainstream engineering cultures.

While there is yet to be a concise, one-line summary of everything that DevOps entails, there has come about a generally accepted agreement on the overarching concepts and practices that define DevOps: culture, automation, measurement, and sharing, or CAMS for short. The CAMS approach to DevOps was defined by Damon Edwards and John Willis at DevOpsDays in 2010. It is described in greater detail next.