DevOps Culture - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 178

neck. In fact, optimizations anywhere else are wasted energy. Above the bottleneck, in-
complete work accumulates. Below the bottleneck, workers are starved for things to do.
Optimizing steps above the bottleneck simply makes more work accumulate. Optimizing
steps below the bottleneck simply improves steps that are underutilized. Therefore fixing
the bottleneck is the only logical thing to do.
Makingallofthishappenrequiresacultureofinnovationandawillingnesstotakerisks.
Riskmustberewardedandfailureembraced.Infact,oncetheThreeWaysofDevOpshave
beenusedtomaketheprocesssmoothandoptimized,youshouldintroducedefectsintothe
system to verify that they are detected and handled. By embracing failure this way, we go
from optimized to resilient.
8.3 History of DevOps
The term “ DevOps ” was coined by Patrick Debois in 2008. Debois noticed that some sites
had evolved the practice of system administration into something fundamentally different.
That is, they had independently reached the conclusion that web sites could be better run
when development and operations were done in collaboration. Debois thought there would
be value in getting these people together to share what they had learned. He started a series
of mini-conferences called “DevOps Days” starting in 2009 in Belgium. The name came
from the concept of bringing developers (dev) and operations people (ops) together.
DevOps Days was a big success and helped popularize the term “ DevOps .” The con-
versations continued on mailing lists and blogs. In May 2010, John Willis and Damon Ed-
wards started the DevOps Cafe Podcast, which soon became a clear-inghouse for DevOps
ideas and discussion. The hashtag “#devops” arose as a way for DevOps followers to
identify themselves on Twitter, which was a relatively new service at the time. The 2011
USENIX LISA Conference (Large Installation System Administration) selected DevOps
as its theme and since then has evolved to incorporate a DevOps focus.
8.3.1 Evolution
Some practitioners say that DevOps is a logical evolution of having sysadmins and deve-
lopers participating in an Agile development cycle together and using Agile techniques for
system work. While the use of Agile tools is common in DevOps, Agile is merely one of
many ways to apply DevOps principles. Techniques such as pair programming or scrum
teams are not required to create a DevOps environment. However, adherence to some of
the basic Agile principles is definitely required.
Other practitioners say that DevOps is the logical evolution of developers doing system
administration themselves due to the popularity of Amazon AWS and (later) similar ser-
vices. In other words, it is developers reinventing system administration. In the past, set-