DevOps is a response to the disconnect between development activity and operations activity. This disconnect often manifests itself as conflict, friction and inefficiency. Development tends to be driven by how many new functionalities can be churned out in a given time, therefore change is its incentive. Operations on the other hand tends be driven by stability of the status quo and its incentive is therefore resisting change.

DevOps describes how we do things rather than ourselves

DevOps is a movement, an approach, a way to organise people and organisations. It’s fundamentally an extension of Agile and Lean as it attempts to instil those same values and practices into Operations. DevOps is about people, collaboration and feedback loops, not about tools. You cannot buy a “DevOps tool” and suddenly be done. There are tools better suited to a DevOps style of working than others, but those come after the hard work is done: getting Development and Operations to collaborate from the outset on common goals.

Some say DevOps is an adjective and a ‘DevOps person’ is someone who cares about and supports the DevOps principles. That makes sense but already recruiters, marketers and others have transformed it into a noun, which is misleading as you cannot be a DevOps. Others suggest it is an adverb so we can use it do describe how we do things rather than to describe ourselves.

We’ve been lucky to be in the right place at the right time and work in, and with, companies and people who were at the forefront of this movement when it was still called Agile Infrastructure/Agile Operations, including many of the people mentioned in the video at the bottom of this page.

Read our Insight “It take two to DevOps” to know more about where we stand and why we started HighOps in the first place.

Apart from our Insights subsection dedicated to DevOps, there are a lot of useful resources readily available online.

But as there is a great deal of confusion about how the movement was born and what it stands for, we recommend three resources in particular:

1. ‘What is DevOps?’ by Damon Edwards as the single, most extensive, well written and complete explanation you will ever need
2. ‘There’s No Such Thing as a “Devops Team”’ by Jez Humble
3.  The (Short) History of DevOps video again by Damon Edwards as the definitive source of truth about how it happened from someone who was there: