Manuel Pais asked me about the origin of the DevOps name, and the honest answer is it was an accident. I wanted to organize a conference about applying agile practices to system administration, but “Agile System Administration Days” was too long for a Twitter hashtag. “DevOpsDays” fit, and “DevOps” stuck. I never intended to create a brand – it just happened because people needed a word for the collaboration patterns they were already discovering independently.
The “no-ops” debate was generating heat at the time. Some people claimed that with platform-as-a-service and automation, operations would disappear entirely. My take was that ops doesn’t vanish – it moves to a different abstraction layer. When you stop managing servers, you still manage containers. When you stop managing containers, you still manage services. The operational concerns persist; they just shift. Every layer of abstraction creates a new operational surface area.
When Manuel asked me to rate the state of DevOps practice, I said “four on a scale of ten.” The ideas were spreading fast, but execution was uneven. Most organizations were in the tools phase – adopting automation without changing the underlying collaboration patterns. Tools matter because they bootstrap the mentality. When developers and operations start sharing a Chef repository, they begin talking. That conversation is where culture change actually starts. But tools without the cultural shift just automate the existing dysfunction faster.
The conversation turned to what was coming next. Security was clearly the emerging frontier. Most security teams operated in exactly the same silo that operations used to occupy – a gate at the end of the process, slowing everything down. Applying the same DevOps patterns to security collaboration felt inevitable. The chef-versus-puppet competition was actually healthy for the ecosystem too, pushing both communities to innovate faster. And my dream for monitoring was an abstraction layer that let you define what to monitor independent of which tool collected it – something that would take years to materialize.
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