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We have always done DevOps, right?

I was talking to some people from old dev teams.  We did unit testing and CI way back in 2005.  We did deployment packages and did iterative development.  We did DevOps right?


Comparing what we did back then to some of the solutions these same guys deliver today, Hell Yea we did DevOps. 


So how do you do fundamental DevOps back then and not do it today?  It is because things like ITIL, SILOs and separations of concerns made you lose your mind.  All these same guys have gone from architects to managers and they have to worry about audits and best practices.


We really lost track of what made our teams great back then.  One bad incident leads to a PMR saying dev can't touch prod.  Then, management started creating silos which made everyone lose sight of the goals that DevOps emphasizes.  Customer Happiness.


Let's really get back to the original question, did we do DevOps.  Not really.  We had large deployments.  We did not automate acceptance testing.  We did not do push button deployments.  We never had deployments without impacting customers.  It probably took a couple days to get code to customers, at best.  We were way ahead of our time but we never went far enough.   Once we separated dev from support, we got further away. 


With all that said, these teams back then were a great foundation for me and I was blessed to work on these teams.



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