Patrick Debois is the founding father of the DevOps movement.
Around 2007, Patrick Debois was consulting on a data center migration for the Belgium government as a system administrator. He becomes frustrated by conflicts between developers and system admins. He pondered over solutions to resolve this conflict.
On the Agile Conference in Toronto in August 2008, software developer Andrew Shafer was supposed to take up a session entitled “Agile Infrastructure.” Only one person attend that session. And that is none other than Patrick Debois! Even Andrew skipped his own session as he thought there was no interest in his topic. Later, Debois hunts down Shafer for a wide-ranging hallway chat. At the end of their chit chat, they formed the Agile Systems Administration Group.
In the O’Reilly Velocity 09 conference, John Allspaw & Paul Hammond presented their iconic talk titled “10 Deploys a Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr.”
After watching the presentation remotely, Debois regretted on Twitter that he could not attend the conference in person. Paul Nasrat tweeted back & questioned him, “Why not organize your own Velocity event in Belgium?”
Debois decided to do exactly that in October 2009. But first, he needed a name for the event. After a few rounds of self brainstorming, he took the first three letters of Development & Operations, added the word “days,” and calls it DevOpsDays.
The conference doors opened on October 30 to an impressive audience of developers, system administrators, etc. When the conference ended, the ongoing discussions at the event continued on Twitter. To create a memorable hashtag, Debois shortened the name to #DevOps. And that’s when I would say the DevOps came into our IT World!
