It started with a hashtag. #DevOps. Now? It’s a job title, a business model, a philosophy, and a category of books and social media posts.
You might have been asked this in an interview:
“What does DevOps mean to you?”
Maybe the interview was for a role called “DevOps Engineer.”
Maybe you’ve even hired a DevOps Engineer. Or you’re working on a project and someone asks for DevOps Support. Maybe you debate whether to brand yourself software engineer or devops engineer. Or maybe SRE.
You see countless articles debating what it all means. But where did it start? Who came up with DevOps?
Who came up with DevOps?
Andrew Clay Shafer coined the term DevOps.
August 2008. Andrew Shafer signs up to give a talk at an Agile conference in Toronto. He calls it Agile Infrastructure. No one shows. Except Patrick Debois. Andrew didn’t even attend his own session—but Patrick found him. And they talked. A lot. About how devs and ops were on different planets. They started a Google group to keep the conversation alive. And that was it. For a while...
June 2009. O’Reilly Velocity. The famous "10+ Deploys Per Day" talk from John Allspaw and Paul Hammond at Flickr. It hit home for Patrick—watching from Belgium. That’s what dev and ops could be. He needed that for his team. But he wasn’t there. So, he tweeted. “Why not start your own?” replied Paul Nasrat.
Patrick took it to heart. In October, DevOpsDays happened. Ghent, Belgium. October 30-31, 2009. Developers, system admins, tools people, all under one roof. Patrick needed a name for the event. Dev for developers. Ops for operations. Simple. To spread the word, he shortened the event name to #DevOps on Twitter. The movement was born.
Since 2010, DevOps has come to represent much more than just practices. It’s become a philosophy embraced by companies everywhere, driving faster software delivery and more collaboration. Titles like DevOps Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), and Platform Engineer grew out of this movement. And now, DevOps is about much more—breaking down silos, fostering continuous improvement in automation, cloud, infrastructure, and containers.
Maybe you’ve got those roles on your team. Maybe you’re asking yourself, “Where did these come from?” It all traces back to a few key moments and a small idea that grew into something big.
Mike Vincent is an American software engineer and writer based in Los Angeles. More about Mike Vincent