In an interview for Java Magazine, ‘the father’ of DevOps Patrick Debois, talked about how the concept of DevOps was created, how the term started to grow more and more through the years and how DevOps is now, as Java magazine calls it, the ‘standard practice at many large developer IT organizations.’
The Agile System Administration Google Group started after Patrick Debois and Andrew Clay Shafer’s meeting at the Agile conference in 2008, where the two discussed the Agile Infrastructure. Debois admitted for Java magazine that the “Agile System Administrators” term was not a ‘very good’ name at the time and after hearing Jean-Paul Sergent talk about the idea of Dev and Ops working together, Debois took Sergent’s suggestions and called the conference “DevOpsDays” instead. Since 2009, when the DevOps Days conferences started to gain popularity in Belgium, the term DevOps has also been used widely. “We started with just a couple of tweets about something that didn’t exist, and we had 60 people from all over the world come to that conference. After the conference, we continued our discussions using the hashtag #DevOps.” Debois said. Today DevOps Days conferences are being held in several countries worldwide.
Before the integration of Dev and Ops, apps ‘suffered’ several problems and developers and operations could not get deep insights to what exactly the problem was, which lead to the same mistakes happening over and over again due to the inability to find out what was going wrong in the first place. “Those were the main drivers that led me to believe that all this needs to be more flexible. Why can’t developers and operations collaborate instead of hitting a brick wall? That was the incentive most developers I worked with had, and I think most people have,” Debois recalled. “If you’re really passionate about what you’re building and you want to improve things, you do want to go that extra mile, and you do want to have that information, and you do feel responsible about how your application is doing in production,” he added.
When asked by Java Magazine’s Stephen Chin if all the feedback from video production and live audiences could be part of future discussions of DevOps, Debois said that compared to the old ways of mobile testing, nowadays testing is much easier, but it is still hard and it most probably would be even harder if the Internet of Things didn’t existed. “The sheer variety of devices, and the need to test all these networked things to keep them updated and humming, will make for a fascinating set of challenges and opportunities,” Debois said.
To read Patrick Debois’ complete interview with Java Magazine go here.