Defining DevOps

Viktor Farcic: I want to start with the same question I've asked everyone else in this book: what is DevOps? Everybody has given me a different answer. Personally, I don't know why everyone defines it differently, but hopefully this will be something we touch upon in our discussion.

"DevOps has meant different things at different points in time."

—Wian Vos

Wian Vos: Actually, that's pretty much what I expected. I think DevOps has meant different things at different points in time. When the term was first coined, it was basically a push for a new way of working from the DevOps manifesto, which I thought, back in the day, made sense. But then DevOps got popular, and as with all things that get popular, the big vendors jumped on the bandwagon—my current employer, Red Hat, included—and turned it into a marketing term.

But what is DevOps to me? DevOps is a paradigm of how to run your...