What we mean by "operations," has changed over the years and some ambiguity has resulted from the pace of change. I'd like to discuss some of these changes.

Firstly, let me explain why I believe I know a little on the subject. I want to invite you to come back in time to the Technology Management Centre for a large Telco in the early 00s where a young man has just sat down for his first day on the job and his supervisor, Spencer hands him a drive bay (hot desking was serious business here) and says, "I recommend you do a stage 1 install of Gentoo because it'll will be a good learning exercise to set up the Operaing System from scratch. Then, when you're done, we'll go over this script I'm working on to automate some tests on our new Cisco 10K routers."

I'd never compiled an operating system before that point, so we never made it to the script but it was the first time in my career when I was suddenly plunged into a world of highly skilled engineers and architects, simply doing some amazing things under very tight requirements and needing to be "DevOps", just to ensure their success. Scripting and automating tests, building our own configuration management system, measuring everything that moved, working cross-functionally, high collaboration and information sharing across teams were all just the norm. We'd also virtualised our environments and were even running containers in production over ten years ago.

From that point, my work career continued in much the same way. Sure, there has been some challenges trying to help some people see the vision but now there is a DevOps community and a wealth of literature, those challenges mostly went away and the approach was less about pushing an agenda to simply agreeing with peoples ideas as they embraced the philosophies as well.

Where did it all start