Hey Habr! I present to your attention the translation of the article by Steve Mezak.
Depending on your point of view, DevOps will be celebrating its ninth or tenth anniversary this year. In 2016, RightScales' State of the Cloud report noted that 70 percent of SMBs are adopting DevOps practices. Every indicator that makes up this score has increased since then. As DevOps prepares to pass its second decade of existence, it would be great to take a stroll through the back alleys of the past and return to the origins of DevOps - and even to the origin of the name itself.
Before 2007: The perfect chain of events
Until 2007, a series of circumstances eventually gave birth to what is known today as DevOps.
Lean already established as best practice. Also known as Toyota production system, lean manufacturing aims to optimize processes on the manufacturing floor. (By the way, Toyota management was initially inspired by the original assembly line methods introduced by the Ford Motor Company.) Continuous improvement is the mantra for lean manufacturing. In practice, the following paths are constantly evaluated:
- Keeping inventory levels of raw materials and finished products at a minimum. Lean manufacturing means a minimum amount of inventory of raw materials for the production of goods and a minimum number of finished products waiting for distribution to orders or shipment.
- Order Queue Minimization. Ideally, if received orders immediately become completed. The key metric of lean manufacturing will always be the time from order to delivery.
- Maximizing the efficiency of the production process. Process reengineering and improved automation are combined to produce goods as quickly as possible. Each production step along the way (cutting, welding, assembly, testing, etc.) is evaluated for inefficiency.
In the IT world, the traditional methods of the waterfall software development model have already given way to fast iterative methods such as Agile. Speed ββwas the battle cry, even if quality sometimes deteriorated in the pursuit of rapid development and deployment. Similarly, cloud computing, in particular Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) have proven to be mature solutions in IT processes and infrastructure.
Finally, toolkits for Continuous Integration (CI). The concept of CI tools was born and introduced by Grady Booch back in 1991 in his Booch Method.
2007-2008: Frustrated Belgian
Belgian consultant, project manager and agile practitioner Patrick Debois has accepted an assignment from a Belgian government ministry to help with data center migration. In particular, he was involved in certification and readiness testing. Responsibilities required him to coordinate and build relationships between the software development teams and the server, database, and network operations teams. His frustration at the lack of cohesion and walls separating the methods of development and operation instilled in him annoyance. The desire for the best soon led Debois to action.
In 2008, at the Toronto Agile Conference, Andrew Schaefer offered to moderate a specially arranged informal meeting to discuss the topic "Agile infrastructure". And only one person came to discuss the topic: Patrick Debois. Their discussion and exchange of ideas advanced the concept of Agile systems administration. In the same year, Debois and Schaefer created the moderately successful Agile Systems Administrator group at Google.
2009: Dev and Ops collaboration case
At the O'Reilly Velocity conference, two Flickr employees, SVP of Technical Operations John Allspaw and CTO Paul Hammond, delivered the now famous presentation "10 Deployments a Day: Dev and Ops Collaboration on Flickr".
The presentation was dramatic, with Allspaw and Hammond reenacting the complex interaction between Development and Operations during a software rollout, along with blame-finding and recriminations along the lines of "It's not my code, it's all your computers!" Their presentation confirmed that the only reasonable course of action is for software development and deployment to be smooth, transparent, and fully integrated. Over time, this presentation has become legendary, and is now historically regarded as a seminal milestone when the IT industry demanded the methodology known today as DevOps.
2010: DevOps in the United States of America
With the growing number of supporters, the DevOpsDays conference was held for the first time in the United States of America in Mountain View (California) immediately after the annual Velocity conference. Fast forward to 2018, there are over 30 DevOpsDays scheduled, including dozens in the United States.
2013: Project "Phoenix"
For many of us, another significant moment in the history of DevOps was the publication of The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Safford. This novel tells the story of an IT manager who finds himself in an impossible situation: he is assigned to save a critical e-commerce project that has gone wrong. The manager's mysterious mentor, a member of the board of directors who is passionate about lean manufacturing methods, suggests to the main character new ways of thinking about IT and developing applications, anticipating the concept of DevOps. By the way, The Phoenix Project inspired us to write the book Outsourcing Otherwise... about a similar business story of a VP of Software using DevOps while developing a major new product outsourced.
DevOps for the future
DevOps should be described as more of a journey, or perhaps an aspiration, than a final destination. DevOps, like Lean, strives for continuous improvement, increased productivity and efficiency, and even continuous deployment. Automated tools for DevOps support continue to evolve.
A lot has been achieved since the inception of DevOps in the last decade, and we expect to see even more in 2018 and beyond.
Source: habr.com