DevOpsDays is the community-organized conference series that named the DevOps movement and became its primary institutional community home. Founded by patrick-debois with the first event in Ghent, Belgium, in October 2009, it now runs dozens of events worldwide annually.
The founding event was small — approximately 60 attendees — but pivotal. It brought together the threads that constituted nascent DevOps: web operations practitioners who had been developing continuous deployment at scale (inspired by the Allspaw/Hammond ten-deploys-per-day-talk at Velocity three months earlier), Agile community members interested in extending Agile to operations, and infrastructure automation developers. The name "DevOps" was coined here, shortened from "DevOpsDays" by Debois to fit a Twitter hashtag.
The conference format is significant: DevOpsDays combines traditional talks with "open spaces" (unconference sessions using Open Space Technology). Open spaces allow attendees to propose and self-organize sessions around topics they want to discuss, rather than a program committee selecting all content. This format is particularly suited to a movement that defines itself by cross-functional collaboration and emphasizes culture and shared ownership — the conference format embodies the movement's values.
The community-organized model distinguishes DevOpsDays from corporate conferences. Each DevOpsDays event is organized by a local volunteer team; the devopsdays.org organization provides brand, organizational guidance, and community connection rather than running events directly. This decentralized structure enabled rapid geographic spread without centralized organizational capacity, reaching cities and regions that corporate conferences wouldn't prioritize.
The first US event ran in Mountain View, California, in 2010. This event is also where john-willis and damon-edwards coined the cams-framework — making it a conceptually generative event, not just a community gathering.
DevOpsDays occupies a different institutional niche than it-revolution's DevOps Enterprise Summit: DevOpsDays is community-practitioner facing, free or low-cost, and locally organized; DOES is enterprise-facing, professionally produced, and expensive. Together they serve the full range of the DevOps community's institutional needs.