The catalyzing talk of the DevOps movement. Presented by john-allspaw (VP Engineering, Flickr) and Paul Hammond (Director of Engineering, Flickr) at velocity-conference on June 23, 2009.
The talk demonstrated that developers and operations could work together using shared tools, shared metrics, and shared on-call responsibilities to deploy to production more than ten times per day — at a time when many organizations deployed monthly or quarterly.
Why This Talk Was Catalyzing
The talk arrived at a moment when Agile development had been established in many organizations, but the dev-ops wall remained: developers delivered code, operations deployed it, and each blamed the other when things went wrong. Allspaw and Hammond showed not only that the wall could come down, but that it could come down at scale (Flickr had millions of users) with measurable improvement in both velocity and stability.
patrick-debois, who would found devopsdays-conference four months later at first-devopsdays-ghent-2009, watched the talk via livestream. By his own account, this talk was the immediate catalyst for organizing the first DevOpsDays event. The connection from this talk to the naming of the "DevOps" movement runs directly through Debois.
Content
The talk covers:
Relationship to Subsequent DevOps Texts
The practices Allspaw and Hammond described — feature flags, shared metrics, collaborative deployment — were codified in continuous-delivery-book (2010) and the-devops-handbook (2016). Etsy, where Allspaw subsequently became CTO, became a canonical DevOps case study and the source of the "blameless postmortem" practice that john-allspaw systematized.
The talk is available as slides (with extensive speaker notes) at slideshare; the video was hosted on the Velocity Conference site.