The Darwin quote about responsiveness to change captures what devops is about better than most definitions. Back in 2008-2009, ops and dev were fighting all the time. I was working on operational systems, jealous of agile developers getting more productive and working together. I experimented with kanban in an operational group to better receive software and give feedback back into projects. In 2009, about 60 people showed up at the first DevOpsDays. We had no idea what devops would become – it was a zeitgeist moment where the pain was obvious to everyone.
What fascinated me was how societies form. We moved from central authorities – like waterfall dictating things, or a broadcaster bringing you the news – toward decentralized collaboration. In IT, we started with Taylor-like divided groups that could be controlled. When you let people work together without central authority, the dynamic changes completely. But this touches belief systems: some people genuinely think a written spec and API is clearer than collaborative discussion.
Am I happy with the current state? No. I wanted more cultural progress. Most people at conferences talk about tools. Agile became TDD and the scrum dance, ITIL became the helpdesk system, and devops risks the same dilution. What fascinates me is that the industry does not get better at keeping the core ideas alive. There is this thirst for tools and technology that vendors exploit. If we just continue believing technology alone solves problems, that is not the right direction.
The next frontier is cross-company collaboration. We cannot get the Google engineer to sit next to us when we use their service. As we increasingly use external services, we need to build trust not just within a company but across companies. The ITIL people would call it supplier management – but the dynamics are fundamentally different because we do not share a boss who can tell us to sit together.
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