The word devops was kind of an accident. The original conference was supposed to be about agile system administration and collaboration, but that name was too long, so we shortened it to DevOpsDays. The name stuck. What made it take off was that so many people had lived the pain of developers and operations not working together – the concept was simple to understand even if it was hard to solve.
People kept asking for a devops manifesto, similar to the agile manifesto. I deliberately refused. Looking at how ITIL had fifteen books and still confused people, and how agile’s manifesto sometimes got treated as a rigid rulebook, I felt that writing it down would limit the idea rather than let it grow. The acronym CAMS – Culture, Automation, Measurement, Sharing – became the closest thing to a summary. It captured the moving parts without locking them down.
One pattern I noticed was that every movement has a schizophrenic relationship between cultural change and technology. ITIL became about ticketing tools. Agile became about TDD. DevOps risked becoming about the CI/CD pipeline. The automation is the trojan horse that helps spread the message, but it can also overtake it. People started confusing the tools with the practice.
When it came to enterprise adoption, the same patterns applied but at a different scale. I saw people from enterprises dismiss what startups were doing, but the thinking was the same – you just had to listen differently. The CAMS framework worked everywhere: collaborate, automate, measure, and share. The ones who only automated without the other three never got the full benefit.
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This summary was generated using AI based on the auto-generated transcript.