Defining DevOps

Viktor Farcic: I want to start by asking you a two-fold question. First, how would you define DevOps, and then how has that definition played out in your career?

Julian Simpson: I used to be a Unix systems administrator. In that role, I spent a lot of time during the dot-com boom building Solaris servers and arguing with developers. This conflict between system administrators and developers carried on for the next three to four years of my career.

During this time, two things became obvious to me. Firstly, the approach of building systems by hand seemed wrong, and secondly, it really seemed counterproductive to handle this conflict. While I can be sucked into a good fight, it didn't seem like a positive way to go about things. Eventually, in 2002, I discovered the CFEngine project and started building all my systems with CFEngine, in order to rebuild those builds.

This was combined with Solaris Jumpstart, which was an awesome technology...