Ceci n'est pas #devops

As much as we don't want recruiters, marketing campaigns, and sales pitches defining devops, practitioners are more inclined to define what DevOps is not than what it is. Perhaps this is fitting, as DevOps began in the land of famed Belgian surrealist René Magritte. This meta-talk will examine the definitions and negative space around the non-definition of DevOps, through the filter of Magritte's works.

Topics covered will include:

• views shifting over time, with examples from talks, podcasts, blog posts, and tweets
• where consensus and dissent exist, including such contentious topics as "enterprise DevOps"
• trends as evinced by divergent tribes in the similar and dissimilar communities active in this space
• the map-territory relation: the importance of words in a world structured by semantics

Part art history and part ethnography, this talk offers new views on some five-year-old questions.

Bridget Kromhout is an operations engineer at DramaFever, the largest streaming video site for international content. She's been paying the bills with Unix sysadmin work since the last time 'flannel shirt over babydoll dress' was a trendy look. Her CS degree emphasis was in theory, but she now deals with the concrete (if 'cloud' can be considered tangible). She likes finicky wide-column data stores, stats-driven monitoring, formal grammars, bicycle-powered camping, and butchering pumpkins for home canning. In her spare time she helps organize her local AWS meetup and devopsdays Minneapolis.