It’s 16 years since the term DevOps was created. Since then we’ve witnessed the evolution to SRE and then today Platform Engineering.

During that time there’s been so much noise and confusion about DevOps job titles, DevOps teams and DevOps tools — and the nonsense rambling about “is it DevOps/DevSecOps/BizDevOps…” Oh and dear vendors “DevOps is not Dead”.

In this talk I’m going to recap the last 16 years, highlighting the important stuff and not the noise — agile, flow, kaizen, friction, constraints, lean, Deming, CAMS, 3 ways, team structures, metrics, cognitive load, abstractions, platform as a product, collaboration and most important of all empathy .

I’ll finish with an explanation of why in the modern AI enthused world of Platform Engineering… …DevOps matters more than ever.