A Belgian engineer coined the term as a Twitter hashtag.
In 2007, a Belgian consultant named Patrick Debois was managing a data center migration for the Belgian government when he grew frustrated by the friction between software developers and system administrators.1 The two groups shared the same goals but operated on opposing schedules and clashing incentives. Developers wanted to ship code quickly. Operations teams wanted stability above all.
At the 2008 Agile Conference in Toronto, a software developer named Andrew Clay Shafer posted a session called "Agile Infrastructure." One person attended. Shafer himself did not show up to his own session, assuming no one would come. The one attendee was Debois.2
Debois tracked Shafer down in the conference hall. Their conversation led to the creation of an Agile Systems Administrator group, with limited initial traction. In June 2009, at the O'Reilly Velocity Conference, Flickr engineers John Allspaw and Paul Hammond gave a presentation titled "10+ Deploys per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr."3 Debois watched the stream from Belgium.
Inspired, he organized his own conference in Ghent that October and called it DevOpsDays. When the discussion moved to Twitter afterward, he shortened the name to #DevOps to fit a hashtag.4
The role of DevOps engineer did not exist before the term did. Once named, it spread. By 2016, the authors of The DevOps Handbook, including Debois himself, had codified the practices that the movement described.5 Gartner's former Research VP Cameron Haight predicted in 2011 that within four years, twenty percent of Global 2000 organizations would adopt DevOps strategies.6
Debois later admitted the naming was accidental. "I picked 'DevOpsDays' as Dev and Ops working together because 'Agile System Administration' was too long," he said in a 2012 interview. "There never was a grand plan for DevOps as a word."7