Velocity Conference was O'Reilly Media's annual conference focused on web performance and web operations, running from 2008 to 2019. Its primary DevOps significance is as the venue for ten-deploys-per-day-talk — the "10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr" talk by john-allspaw and paul-hammond in June 2009 that directly catalyzed the first devopsdays-conference.
Velocity predated the DevOps movement and was oriented toward web performance (page load times, CDN optimization, browser rendering) as much as operations culture. But the web performance community and the operations discipline overlapped significantly, and Velocity became a venue where web operations practitioners could share technical practices and build community. This made it the natural platform for the Allspaw/Hammond talk, which was less about performance optimization than about the organizational conditions that made high-velocity deployment safe.
The catalytic effect of the June 2009 Velocity talk was not accidental: O'Reilly conferences in this period were unusually good at surfacing emerging practices in the web technology world, and Velocity brought together exactly the audience — web operations people and developers at high-traffic sites — who had been developing continuous deployment practices independently and who would recognize the Flickr practices as both significant and generalizable.
After devopsdays-conference established its own ecosystem in 2009-2010, Velocity and DevOpsDays served overlapping but distinct audiences. Velocity retained its performance and web operations focus; DevOpsDays became the community conference for the DevOps cultural movement. Velocity ran O'Reilly-produced events in San Jose, New York, and eventually Amsterdam and Beijing before O'Reilly discontinued the conference series in 2019.
Velocity's contribution to DevOps is primarily historical: it was the platform for the movement's most important catalyzing talk and helped legitimate web operations as a professional discipline through eight years of conference programming before the DevOps community had built its own institutional infrastructure.