Okay, I'll admit it. I don't actually know what devops is. I know what developers do and what sysadmins do. Is devops just a buzzword for one person who can do both? Or does it mean something other than that?
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devops
In small companies it usually always exists by accident. I think the "hype" is more around large companies that have huge barriers and sometimes friction between development and IT or sustaining Operations.
Deployment automation, monitors, backups, cleanup...
But yes, my impression is that it's normally a developer who "trends towards doing systems administration" – so someone who knows the codebase, but can provision and wrangle servers. So, someone like me (I write full stack apps, but my "speciality" is the server end of things).
Because, atleast in my understanding, it's totally in the working area of sysadmins to set up a server, install and configure software, configure monitoring, etc. The typical sysadmin will also write scripts and stuff to do that.
My bet is that it just came up by some angry sysadmins who felt like they need to differentiate from the dumber kind of admin who can barely touch a shell.
Of course a software developer may also write deployment scripts and similar stuff, so that's where it becomes fuzzy.
I never really thought about that term, but thanks to yyour question i just figured that i will drop the term from my vocabulary. It's too fuzzy, it's too much of a buzzword.
Ben Rockwood from Joyent has a good conceptual talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5E--QSBVBY , "DevOps Demysitified".