Last year, DevOps was just beginning to coalesce into the movement it has become today.  It's growing stronger by the day and Peter Debois obtained an excellent overview of the movement in a guest post submitted to his blog by Stephen Nelson-Smith. 

"In the last few months, a movement has begun to take shape. It's a movement of people who think it's time for change in the IT industry - time to stop wasting money, time to start delivering great software, and building systems that scale and last. This movement is being called Devops. But what is Devops? Where did it come from? And what can it achieve?"

Guest post by : Stephen Nelson-Smith @lordcope a Technical Manager and Devop based in Hampshire, UK and author of Agile Sysadmin

Here's a select exerpt from Stephen Nelson-Smith's post.  Go to the link in the reference box for the full post:

... the Devops movement is characterized by people with a multidisciplinary skill set - people who are comfortable with infrastructure and configuration, but also happy to roll up their sleeves, write tests, debug, and ship features. These are people who making connections, because they can - because they have feet in multiple camps, they can be ambassadors, peace makers, facilitators and communicators. And the point of the movement is to identify these, currently rare, people and encourage them, compare ideas, and start to identify, train, recruit and popularize this way of doing IT.  -- Stephen Nelson-Smith