The history of DevOps
A Tale of Two Teams
To understand DevOps as a software and systems development culture, it is important to understand its origins and why it came into existence.
The waterfall and agile software and systems development frameworks have their limitations; comparing them against DevOps is far beyond the scope of this book. For this book, you can consider waterfall and agile to be development frameworks and DevOps as a development culture.
We should recognize that agile’s approach to development is closer to DevOps than waterfall’s as they share many of the same goals. The approach of agile is in contrast to waterfall’s; there is no fixed scope, only an estimated scope, with development consisting of many iterative changes and loops of the cycle, as shown in the following diagram. These development iterations will be working closely with the customer and stakeholders but will not involve the operations silo. The following diagram shows the fundamental differences between the waterfall and agile frameworks and how their approach differs to development:
Figure 5.18 – Waterfall and agile frameworks
This development occurs in silo teams, where there is no collaboration between developers and operations engineers, which is at the root of the issue that DevOps sets out to address.
Between these two team silos, there has traditionally been a certain lack of understanding of each other’s perspectives. With a lack of trust and communication, politics, no shared interest, and goals that are opposing, there is a melting pot of issues that do nothing to help the goal of building, releasing, deploying, and operating software and systems to make them the best that they can be.
These two teams push in different directions and function at different levels. Developers want to release systems and software at speed, but operations engineers need steady control; this leads to friction. The development vision is fundamentally at odds with the historically cumbersome, static, and technical debt of operations. The following diagram visualizes these opposing cultures:
Figure 5.19 – Opposing team cultures
The developer’s need for speed impacts quality, and the operation’s need for control impacts agility.
These clashes between the them and us cultures and mindsets of development and operations were the key catalyst for the birth of DevOps.
This section looked at the origins of DevOps. In the next section, we will look at what DevOps is.
