/dev/spout: What is DevOps?

/dev/spout: What is DevOps?

I've gotten really interested in the topic of DevOps lately, after I had an "aha!" moment where I realized that no amount of hope or "trying hard" will get around the fact that development wants change and operations wants stability. Most organizations have created a classic suboptimization problem where they've drawn their organization boundaries in such a way that no one is actually tasked with maximizing the total value delivered.

"DevOps" purports itself to be the solution to this problem, so I wanted to take a look at this concept and try to figure out its merits. I'm going to try to answer a few basic questions: What is DevOps? What are its philosophical origins? Is there reason to think it can deliver on it's promise? Also, every new idea has its critics so I want to examine the leading criticisms of DevOps and see what useful ideas we can take away from them.