How DevOps Began

Summary

To get to grips with DevOps we need to follow its journey, from small beginnings to history making moments. Why DevOps was created and how it works.

How DevOps Began

To understand the importance of DevOps we first need to understand how it came about and why there was a need for it. DevOps isn’t just one person’s idea, it is the converging of many different management and philosophical movements, all looking for solutions to their problems and a better way forward. This proves that progressive thinking was always prevalent and lessons were being learned across the board. In practice DevOps evidently relies on many areas of knowledge and expertise, such as learning organisations, safety culture, human factors, resilience engineering, theory of constraints and many more. The result of all this combining of knowledge and experience is higher quality, stability, reliability and lower costs.

Keep it lean

We can start right back in the 1980s with the Toyota Production System, where the lean movement first began with value stream mapping, kanban boards, and total productive maintenance were codified. Following this the Lean Enterprise Institute started looking in to how lean applications could benefit other industr es like healthcare and hospitality. As lean principles are about creating better value for customers, it could inevitably be rolled out to different industries.

What is agile?

In 2001 the agile manifesto was put together by seventeen leading minds in software development. These forward thinkers wanted a lightweight approach to software development processes, and to do this they proposed delivering working software more frequently. They wanted a shorter timescale, from a couple of months to a couple of weeks. This meant organising small teams who were self motivated and crucially, had high levels of trust in management.

How it came together

The seed of DevOps may have been planted decades ago, but the term was officially coined by Patrick Debois in Belgiumin 2009 when he created the firstDeOpsDays in Ghent. This followed on from the Velocity Conference earlier that year where the presentation ’10 Deploys per day and ops cooperation at Flikr’ by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond raised the roof. Attendees talked of being in the presence of history being made, and of experiencing something profound. High prise indeed.

Back to Toyota

Twenty years after the Toyota Production System began Mike Rother wrote‘ Toyota Kata, managing people for Improvement’. Although Mike had been there in those early days and had seen how lean principles could also benefit other industries, he was disappointed to find that when other companies adopted it they weren’t seeing the predicted levels of performance. What he found was that they were missing the important practice of Improvement Kata. This is about daily routines and constant improvement, setting weekly targets and the constant improvement of daily work. It’s not a one stop fix, it’s continual.

DevOps is a culmination of practices and principles, of the need to improve constantly and to work together to create better outcomes. DevOps was born of the need to progress and find workable answers to problems on a daily basis. It has had a long journey already and it has a bright future ahead.