The name devops stuck almost by accident. It was about breaking barriers between groups – dev, ops, and the business – getting everybody behind the same goal instead of optimizing for local departmental wins. The term might not be exact, but it captured something real.
What stood out at this Mountain View event was the conversation around culture. The suggestion to start with behavior first resonated deeply. Technology-wise, we might not have had all the tools we wanted, but automation is a solvable problem. Getting people into the spirit of working together – that is the hard part, and we were only beginning to figure it out.
Cloud computing came up as a key enabler. Getting a new machine quickly, shortening feedback loops on infrastructure – that changed how enterprises could operate. Even if you were not doing cloud directly, you could learn from the patterns people were developing there and apply them internally with virtualization.
The open issues at the time were huge. We were like Alcoholics Anonymous – everyone pleading guilty and sharing their war stories. The next step was to figure out why certain approaches worked for some and not for others. People kept asking “how can we become devops?” and there was no easy recipe. Value stream mapping came up as a way to see the whole chain, from business through operations, and start improving step by step. Every company is different, but you need that global picture first to know where to optimize.
Watch on YouTube – available on the jedi4ever channel
This summary was generated using AI based on the auto-generated transcript.