The very concept of DevOps was just beginning to emerge in the head of Patrick Debois, a Belgian IT specialist, in 2007, when he set himself the goal of a deeper analysis of work in the IT industry. That is why the young specialist was employed in various companies for a short time, and, moreover, trying to occupy a wide variety of positions. There was only one unchanging rule – to work in the IT field.

And then one day, Patrick needed to test the whole data warehouse, which was transferred from one place to another. There he began to work closely with two groups of specialists: the developers from dev and directly those who were involved in the operation in ops. Thanks to this, Debois felt the salt of working in such conditions and problems in managing software development in general.

But there was another funny case in 2008 when Debois met a like-minded person – Andrew Shafer, a follower of the Agile methodology, who organized a special lecture event to discuss a number of problems.

But no one showed up for the discussion except Patrick. Even Shafer decided not to wait for anyone and left without starting work. But the persistent Belgian engineer decided to find Andrew and present his vision of a problem that is relevant to the IT sector. And so began the communication of two ardent supporters of development optimization, who decided to act using Scrum and Agile.

In 2009, Patrick Debois was inspired by a live broadcast of a talk by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond, who worked together at Flickr. The Belgian decided to create something similar because he saw the level of response to such events. So the idea came up to gather as many developers and system administrators as possible in the city of Ghent and arrange a conference called “DevOpsDays».

Even today, it remains unclear how it was possible to gather such a huge number of specialists from the field of information technology, but the fact remains. Everyone who had such an opportunity came to the conference. After the event, communication between the participants took place on Twitter. The community decided to shorten the name and use the “#DevOps” hashtag, which became associated with the DevOps methodology.

Distribution of DevOps and its participation in the development process

As it turned out, Debois was right and found like-minded people who promoted the idea of DevOps. Each participant tried to contribute to the vision of the ideal structure of the company, which could significantly improve the development process. No matter how hard various analysts try to ignore this movement, IT companies are increasingly thinking about the potential of DevOps.

Thanks to this, the DevOps community has managed to create a complete methodology for optimizing work. When the others saw the description of these methods, they were delighted and interested in their further development. It was then that corporate analysts decided to still give a chance to the discussed novelty.

The first to decide on the experiment were specialists such as Michael Kote and Jay Lyman. They worked for Red Monk and The 451 Group, respectively. The first message that they started working according to the DevOps methodology was published in early spring 2011 in a bright presentation.

Already in 2015, it became clear to everyone that it was impossible to stop the massive DevOps movement. And why, if it brings real benefits? According to statistics, already at that time, the number of companies that had to switch to software development management according to the new methodology was more than 20%.

After such high-profile statements, the largest participants (one of them by the link) in the IT market decided to also try to implement DevOps. And this is already a weighty argument! How DevOps went mainstream.

Why you need to know DevOps history

Firstly, everyone should know what origins this or that program stood for in order to better understand the essence of its work. Moreover, if you are well acquainted with the history of the DevOps methodology, then you understand that it was created precisely from the point of view of practical application, and not from a theoretical one.

There are no beautiful marketing solutions or universal means here. The whole DevOps methodology is trying to help the company change its vision of the development process itself, improve the internal atmosphere in the team, and form a clear goal with clear achievements. That’s why devops solution is so in demand right now.