DevOps

DevOps is the cultural and engineering practice of bringing software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) into the same team - and sometimes the same person. The goal is to shrink the time it takes to get an idea from a developer’s laptop into production, without sacrificing reliability.

It is not a job title, a tool, or a phase in the pipeline. A working DevOps practice usually has all of:

• Shared responsibility for the whole lifecycle, from code to incident response.
• Automation of build, test, deploy, and infrastructure provisioning.
• Tight feedback loops between production behaviour and the people writing the code that produced it.
• Version-controlled configuration for application code and the environment it runs in.

Most “DevOps tools” - Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes - only deliver value when wrapped in those practices. Adopting the tooling without the cultural shift tends to produce the same operational pain with extra YAML.