This article is based on reporting originally published on TechTarget, drawing on coverage of Microsoft Build 2018 and interviews with industry practitioners and analysts.
The Catchphrase That Launched a Hashtag
Microsoft is far from the only major vendor pushing enterprise DevOps tooling. IBM, CA Technologies, and others all offer comprehensive platforms aimed at helping enterprise shops adopt DevOps to improve developer productivity, accelerate delivery, and raise software quality. But Microsoft’s messaging attracted particular attention after the Build 2018 developer conference in Seattle — specifically because of one phrase: “Rub some DevOps on it.”
The phrase belongs to Donovan Brown, a senior DevOps program manager at Microsoft and one of the company’s most recognizable conference speakers. Brown is known for high-energy live demos showcasing Microsoft’s DevOps toolchain, and for his willingness to go the extra mile — reportedly pulling an all-nighter to rework a demo after a last-minute omission was flagged, then returning to the stage the next morning on one hour of sleep.
Brown explained the origin of the catchphrase in a blog post. While working through a customer’s pain points implementing Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), he quipped that the team was going to “rub a little DevOps on it and make it better.” The room laughed. Brown said the moment reframed DevOps as a practical remedy rather than an abstract methodology. He used the phrase during his demo at Microsoft Build 2016, and when he left the stage, Twitter had already turned it into a trending topic. He formalized it as the hashtag #RubDevOpsOnIt, which now trends whenever Brown presents.
Why Some DevOps Practitioners Winced
Not everyone in the DevOps community received the phrase warmly. Critics characterized it as pithy at best and condescending at worst — a one-liner that reduces a complex organizational transformation to a topical cream.
“Honestly I’m not a huge fan of the catchphrase. It’s pithy, it’s catchy, but all it makes me think about is Silence of the Lambs: ‘It puts the DevOps on its skin or it gets the hose again.'”
Ted Neward, Director of Developer Relations, Smartsheet
The concern behind the joke is legitimate: DevOps adoption is not a quick fix. It requires meaningful cultural change — breaking down silos between development and operations teams, establishing psychological safety, rethinking incentive structures, and investing in automation infrastructure. Reducing that journey to a slogan risks setting unrealistic expectations, particularly for organizations that are still early in their transformation.
Brown, for his part, is unambiguous about the intent. As a developer with roughly 20 years of experience, an Agile background, and a history as a process consultant, he is well aware of the organizational lift DevOps requires. His response to accusations of talking down to the audience was direct:
“To talk down to the audience would be putting myself down as well; I have DevOps in my title. Why would I dismiss or talk down about myself?”
Donovan Brown, Senior DevOps Program Manager, Microsoft
His point is that the phrase is a conference hook — a way to connect with an audience before demonstrating an end-to-end DevOps pipeline. In that context, it functions more like a comedian’s opening line than a policy statement.
The Substance Behind the Slogan
Whether you find “Rub Some DevOps On It” charming or cringe-worthy often depends on how much context you bring to it. Audience members who have watched Brown present multiple times understand it as shorthand for a much richer technical story. Those encountering it for the first time — or reading a tweet without seeing the demo — may reasonably interpret it as glib.
Neward acknowledged the tension:
“I’d steer clear of that catchphrase, personally, simply because I think there are better ways to express the ideal of DevOps being something that you can apply in a number of scenarios and in a number of incremental ways.”
Ted Neward, Director of Developer Relations, Smartsheet
That observation points to something worth unpacking: DevOps is something you apply incrementally and contextually. The problem with most snappy vendor slogans is not that they are wrong — it is that they compress away the nuance practitioners need to actually succeed.
What Is DevOps, Really? The Definition Problem
The debate over Brown’s catchphrase is, at a deeper level, a symptom of a broader problem: the industry still lacks a standard definition of DevOps.
Brown authored Microsoft’s official definition: “The union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users.” It is clean and broadly cited. But analyst Theresa Lanowitz of Voke noted that survey research conducted by Voke found more than 80 unique definitions of DevOps across respondents — suggesting that organizations are working from fundamentally different understandings of what they are trying to achieve.
Lanowitz raised a sharper critique of Microsoft’s messaging specifically: if DevOps is premised on bridging the gap between development and operations, she argued that Microsoft’s conference presence and tooling narrative largely addressed the developer side of the equation while leaving the operations side underexplored. Whether that reflects a genuine gap in Microsoft’s platform or a gap in how it was presented at Build 2018 is worth scrutiny.
What This Means for DevOps Practitioners
The “Rub Some DevOps On It” debate is a useful lens for evaluating vendor DevOps messaging more broadly. Here are the questions practitioners should ask when assessing any vendor’s DevOps narrative:
- Does the tooling address both Dev and Ops concerns? End-to-end DevOps requires more than CI/CD pipelines. Monitoring, incident response, on-call workflows, and infrastructure-as-code are equally important.
- Does the vendor acknowledge the cultural dimension? Tools alone do not produce DevOps outcomes. Organizational structure, team incentives, and leadership buy-in are prerequisites.
- Is the definition of success measurable? Slogans compress complexity. Ask vendors to map their tooling to concrete metrics: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and change failure rate.
- Is the messaging audience-appropriate? A keynote catchphrase designed to energize a developer conference crowd should not be mistaken for a transformation strategy. Evaluate the documentation, reference architectures, and customer case studies instead.
Bottom Line
Donovan Brown’s catchphrase is a conference device, not a methodology. The real question it surfaces — whether major vendors’ DevOps messaging accurately conveys the scope of organizational change required — is worth taking seriously. As long as DevOps lacks a universally agreed-upon definition, vendor messaging will continue to fill that vacuum, sometimes helpfully and sometimes with oversimplification. Practitioners are best served by holding any vendor’s story up against the operational and cultural realities their own teams face, rather than accepting a keynote framing at face value.