From Siloed Teams to Seamless Shipping: The DevOps Backstory

Hey there,

Ever stopped to think about how “normal” daily deployments have become?

Well…it wasn’t always this way.

Today, we’re taking a quick look at how DevOps came to be and how it has reshaped how we build, test, and ship software. 

To appreciate why DevOps matters, we’ll rewind a little. 

• What did software development look like before DevOps?

• What challenges pushed teams to rethink their approach?

Let’s get into it

Pre-DevOps Era: Isolated efforts

In the early days, software development was both slow, with application deployments stretching up to a year, and isolated within separate teams. The Waterfall model, which was used to divide projects into rigid phases: requirements, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance. 

Although this model had its pros, like predictability, it remained inflexible regarding customer feedback during development.

Then came Agile in the late 1990s, combating the rigidity of the Waterfall model. Launched formally in 2001, Agile’s methodology emphasized individuals and interactions over processes, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan. Encouraging teams to work in short, iterative cycles, known as “Sprints,” which sped up development and improved quality. 

But even then, gaps and conflicts remained between developers and operations, such as misaligned priorities, environment mismatch, deployment delays, and more.

In 2007, Patrick Debois, an IT consultant, frustrated by this disconnect, believed there had to be a way to create synergy between the teams. He figured that integrating Agile practices commonly used by developers into operations could bridge the gap. 

Then, in 2009, a talk by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond, “10+ deploys per day - Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr,” drove the adoption of these practices. That same year, Patrick organized the first DevOpsDays Conference in Ghent, Belgium, and it was described as “The conference that brings development and operations together”. This was where the term "DevOps" was first used.

DevOps is a culture and approach that closes the gap between teams and eliminates roadblocks. It’s a process that enables increased quality, better efficiency, faster time-to-market, and happier customers. 

A Whitepaper produced by DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) in collaboration with Google showed that organizations that embrace DevOps practices experience better organizational performance. 

It’s possible to forget how much has changed. But today’s seamless deployment pipelines have their roots in years of iteration, frustration, and breakthroughs like this. While DevOps may have originated as a response to misalignment between teams, it has evolved into the foundation on which modern software is built.

Even with newer technologies and innovations emerging, the core principles of  DevOps —collaboration, continuous integration, and continuous delivery remain as relevant as ever. They are all the more essential in a cloud-native world.

It’s amazing how far we’ve come, right? I think it’s even more exciting thinking about where we’re headed. 

If you found today’s edition helpful, share this link with your friends or colleagues. Someone else might need a quick refresher too😉.

Until then, catch you in the next one. 

Divine Odazie
Founder of EverythingDevOps