This keynote at DevOps Days Ukraine traces my personal DevOps journey through 130+ presentations, year by year, as a way of reflecting on how the movement evolved and how my mental model changed.
It started in 2007 with frustration about receiving war files at a Java conference – operations was missing from the agile definition of “done.” Applying agile principles like Kanban to operations work was an early experiment. In 2009 we accidentally created DevOps Days, and the “hippie days” of excitement about collaboration began. My first mental map tried to capture the whole IT world: sysadmins on the right, developers on the left, and CI/CD as the emerging bridge. The core tension was dev wanting speed and ops wanting stability.
The 2011 tool explosion (Puppet, Chef, CFEngine) taught me that tools bootstrap new ways of working even if purists say “DevOps is not about tools.” My own contribution, Vagrant, came from this era. Open source sharing and community spirit drove DevOps Days forward. By 2012 I had structured my thinking into four areas: delivery to production, operational feedback to the project, meta-knowledge about how we work, and business feedback. This later simplified into the Three Ways.
Running a startup from 2014 taught hard lessons about edge cases that bust DevOps mantras. Apple’s App Store approval process breaks “deploy faster.” One-hour live TV shows break “run all tests first.” Sometimes manual testing is the pragmatic choice. The serverless shift revealed that DevOps extends beyond company walls to supplier relationships – SaaS vendors communicate through documentation, postmortems, and conferences, not just APIs.
The DevOps Handbook reaching enterprises was validating but also humbling – companies that had ignored us for years suddenly wanted help. The startup failing taught me that when the bottleneck is in HR, marketing, or sales rather than IT, DevOps excellence alone will not save you. DevSecOps expanded the map further. A thin book on trust crystallized something important: we over-index on technical competence while neglecting sincerity, reliability, and care as dimensions of trust-building.
My eventual definition: DevOps is everything you do to overcome friction created by silos. The “reinventing organizations” framework showed that company cultures mix command-and-control, measurement, empowerment, and autonomy simultaneously – each with its own paradox. Platform teams risk becoming the new silos. But complexity keeps rising, new tools keep appearing, and that is okay. DevOps as a meme – the smallest unit of cultural identity – will survive regardless of what we call it.
Watch on YouTube — available on the jedi4ever channel
This summary was generated using AI based on the auto-generated transcript.