What's a DevOps blog without the discussion about what DevOps is?

If nothing else, DevOps is a buzzword that means different things to different people.

Ted Dziuba thinks that DevOps is a trend of nonsense "where system administrators start writing unit tests and other things to help the developers warm up to them." DevOps is certainly not about system administrators writing unit tests. DevOps is not about Ted Dziuba learning "Operations" (aka UNIX) either. DevOps is about system administrators, Ted Dziuba, and developers working closely together sharing knowledge about unit tests, UNIX, etc. to produce and deliver products.

Dmitriy Samovskiy thinks that DevOps is a newly re-defined standalone discipline "at the border between software engineering and ops, which focuses on developing software for the infrastructure on top of which end-user-facing software is running." In other words, Dmitriy believes that DevOps = Infrastructure as Code. To me DevOps is a lot more than this. Why would you need to introduce another buzzword "DevOps" to replace an already cool buzzword "Infrastructure as Code?" Besides, Infrastructure as Code has been around for quite some time (Cfengine has been around since 1993).

I personally share the opinion of Adam Jacob and Ben Rockwood. DevOps is a cultural and professional movement. Ben puts it this way.

DevOps is a buzzword which identifies a new cultural evolution in systems administration. It comes from the WebOps world where the divide between programmers who write the software ("dev") and sysadmins who deploy and manage the software ("ops") is paper thin.

[..] At just the right time in history, Patrick Debois comes along and says "Devops" and proposes rethinking the way we do operations. No one really cares what Patrick says after that because so many of us have been rethinking all these things and just didn't have a word to put to it. "Devops" is the word.
DevOps is the WebOps culture that outgrew WebOps. WebOps culture spreads not because it's cool, but because the types of problems that used to be unique to WebOps environments become commonplace. DevOps / WebOps culture offers solutions to problems associated with management of massive server farms running in-house code, continuous integration, high scalability / high availability on generic hardware, cloud infrastructure and others. Many traditional systems administrations, development, or operations organizations are getting hit by the DevOps issues like BlockBuster got hit by Netflix and the results are never pretty. Software developers get hit by Software As A Service (SaaS), system administrators get hit by "the Cloud", and operations get hit by development-quality systems running production. Environments where Developers and Operations share responsibility for product success are no longer limited to WebOps.

After working in WebOps organizations for the last decade, I have some interesting and increasingly relevant experiences to share. That's why I created this blog.


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