What is DevOps?

Modern software development and IT operations

Cloud platforms and services form the essential infrastructure for DevOps and microservices, enabling the modern software development and IT operations ecosystem.

Before we get started, you might want to explore some related topics — they provide useful background that will help you get the most out of this post:

• 👉 What are Microservices?
• 👉 Containerization. Docker and containers. Ephemeral, Idempotent, and Immutable.
• 👉 The Cloud — what is it? Cloud services and platforms.
• 👉 DevOps tools by category for 2025

1. DevOps Defined

DevOps combines software development (Dev) and operations (Ops) into a unified approach to boost the efficiency, speed, and security of software development and delivery. It’s a methodology that integrates the work of both teams by fostering a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility. This streamlined approach creates a more agile software development lifecycle.

DevOps, Agile and Lean

We can say that DevOps incorporates automation processes between Dev and Ops teams on top of the Agile approach.

Agile methodology

Agile in software development is a flexible project management approach that breaks projects into phases and focuses on delivering small, workable parts of a project quickly and making improvements based on feedback. Teams work in cycles of planning, executing, and evaluating to adapt and enhance their processes and outcomes.

Agile and DevOps both focus on collaboration, continuous improvement, and delivering working software. They work well together to make software development more efficient:

• Agile: Emphasizes iterative development and customer satisfaction by delivering small, workable parts of a project quickly and improving based on feedback.
• DevOps: Focuses on automating processes and integrating development and operations teams to streamline workflows and enhance collaboration.

Lean methodology

Lean methodology is a set of principles aimed at optimizing business processes by:

• eliminating waste and continuously improving.

Originating from Toyota’s production system, it focuses on creating value for the customer, streamlining workflows, and fostering a culture of respect and teamwork.

DevOps Explained

DevOps is about teams working together to quickly create, build, and deliver secure software. It combines development (Dev) and operations (Ops) to speed up delivery through automation, collaboration, fast feedback, and continuous improvement.

Fail fast!

In the past, developers created software, while system administrators and operations specialists deployed and maintained it. This separation often led to conflicts. DevOps bridges this gap, combining these functions to make development and operations more consistent and efficient.

Goals and Benefits

• Incremental development
• Fast feedback
• Efficiency, speed, and rapid delivery
• Accountability and shared responsibility
• Secure
• Accelerate time to market
• Adapt to the market and competition

Common Misconceptions about DevOps:

1. DevOps is just automation: While automation is crucial, DevOps is more about fostering a culture of collaboration, communication, and integration between development and operations teams to enhance software quality and delivery speed.
2. DevOps is just a job title: DevOps is a mindset and a set of practices, not a specific job title. Anyone involved in software development and delivery, including developers, testers, and operations engineers, can adopt a DevOps mindset and practices.
3. DevOps eliminates the need for IT operations: DevOps doesn’t eliminate IT operations. Instead, it transforms how operations teams work by encouraging collaboration with development teams and introducing new tools and processes for deployment, monitoring, and maintenance.

DevOps Culture

To fully implement DevOps, adopting a DevOps culture is essential. This involves significant changes in how people work and collaborate. While DevOps practices automate and optimize processes, the true benefits are only realized when the organization and its people embrace a DevOps culture.

The Principals

• Automation of the software development lifecycle: enabling teams to release code multiple times a day by streamlining processes like testing, integration, and deployment. This shift from manual to automated tasks has drastically reduced release cycles from years to days.
• Collaboration and communication: essential for integrating development, operations, security, and other stakeholders. While teams often have different priorities and perspectives, effective communication bridges these gaps.
• Continuous improvement: DevOps builds on Lean and Agile methodologies to reduce waste and drive continuous improvement. By automating repetitive tasks and streamlining processes, DevOps teams focus on improving release times, reducing mean-time-to-recovery, and minimizing bugs, all while continuously measuring performance metrics to identify areas for enhancement.
• Short feedback loops: A key DevOps principle is integrating user feedback at every stage. By leveraging automation, enhancing communication and collaboration, and focusing on continuous improvement, DevOps teams can better understand and meet user needs.

The Practices

DevOps covers a wide range of practices across the application lifecycle.

• Version control: The essential practice of tracking and managing every change made to source code and other files. It’s closely related to source code management.
• Agile: Involves using iterative, incremental, and lean methods to streamline and speed up project delivery.
• Infrastructure as code: IaC lets teams manage system resources like code, with definitions stored and versioned for easy review. This ensures reliable, repeatable deployments, automates processes, reduces human error, and simplifies duplicating environments across data centers and cloud platforms.
• Configuration management: Involves managing the state of system resources like servers and databases. It uses tools to roll out changes systematically, preventing configuration drift. Combined with Infrastructure as Code, it allows for easy automation and templating.
• Continuous Integration (CI): The practice of regularly merging all code changes into the main branch, automatically testing each change, and automatically starting a build.
• Continuous Delivery (CD): Continuous Delivery (CD) works alongside Continuous Integration (CI) to automate infrastructure provisioning and the application release process. Together, they are commonly referred to as CI/CD.
• Shift-left: A term for shifting security and testing much earlier in the development process. Doing this can help speed up development while simultaneously improving code quality.
• Continuous monitoring: Continuous monitoring provides real-time visibility into the entire application stack, from infrastructure to software components, by collecting telemetry and metadata and setting alerts for critical conditions.

The Evolution

The evolution of DevOps has progressed through four distinct phases, each marked by changes in technology and organizational practices. This growth reflects the increasing complexity within DevOps, driven by two main trends:

• Transition to Microservices: Moving from monolithic architectures to flexible microservices has increased the demand for specialized DevOps tools, enhancing granularity and agility.
• Increase in Tool Integration: The rise in projects and the need for more DevOps tools have led to more integrations, prompting organizations to rethink their approach to adopting and integrating these tools.

DevOps and the Application Lifecycle Management

The DevOps lifecycle is a series of practices and processes designed to help the business deliver software faster and more reliably. It typically includes:

• Planning: Defining what needs to be built.
• Development: Writing the code.
• Testing: Ensuring the code works correctly.
• Deployment: Releasing the software to users.
• Monitoring: Keeping an eye on the software’s performance.
• Feedback: Gathering user input to make improvements.

DevOps vs SRE

DevOps = Delivery

• Scope: Focuses on improving the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
• Infrastructure as a Code: automates infrastructure management through code, enabling consistent and scalable deployments.
• CI/CD: automating build, test, and deployment.
• Release automation: streamlines the deployment process by using automated tools.
• Environmental build: separate dev, test, and prod environments.
• Metrics: deployment frequency and lead time.
• Team Structure: developers and operations working together.

SRE = Reliability

• Scope: Operations, post-deployment monitoring, incident management, and system optimization, as well as availability.
• Monitoring and Alerting: continuously tracking system performance and notifying the team of any issues.
• Capacity planning: the system can handle future workloads by predicting and preparing for resource needs.
• Metrics: uptime, latency, and mean time to recovery (MTTR).
• Team Structure: Software engineers with a focus on operations.

What is Shift-Left

Shift-left is a smart way to improve software development by moving tasks to earlier stages — Plan and Design; Develop and Build. This helps teams find and fix problems sooner, saving time and money. Here are some key shift-left practices with examples:

• Automated Testing: Imagine running tests automatically every time you make a change to the code. For example, if you add a new feature, automated tests can quickly check if it works without breaking anything else.
• Code Reviews: Think of code reviews as having a teammate look over your work. For instance, before merging your code, a colleague reviews it to ensure it’s clean and follows best practices.
• Security Checks: Implementing security checks early means catching vulnerabilities before they become serious. For example, running security scans on your code as you develop helps prevent potential breaches.

By adopting these practices early, teams can avoid small issues turning into big problems, leading to a smoother and more efficient development process.

CI/CD pipeline

The “CD” in CI/CD stands for continuous delivery and/or continuous deployment. Both involve automating pipeline stages, but they highlight different levels of automation. The choice between them depends on the risk tolerance and specific needs of the development and operations teams.

Continuous Integration

Continuous integration (CI) is an automation process that enables developers to frequently merge code changes into a shared branch. Each update triggers automated tests to ensure the reliability of the merged code.

In modern development, multiple developers work on different features simultaneously. Without CI, merging all changes on a single “merge day” can be tedious and error-prone, especially if developers use different local environments. CI addresses this by validating changes through automated builds and tests, making it easier to identify and fix conflicts quickly. This ensures that the application remains stable and reduces the risk of integration issues.

Continuous Delivery

Continuous delivery (CD) automates the release of validated code to a repository after builds and tests are automated in CI. It ensures that every stage, from merging code changes to delivering production-ready builds, involves test and release automation. This allows the operations team to quickly deploy apps to production.

In practice, continuous delivery means developers’ changes are automatically tested for bugs and uploaded to a repository (like GitHub or a container registry). From there, the operations team can deploy the code to a live environment. This approach addresses visibility and communication issues between development and business teams, ensuring the codebase is always ready for deployment with minimal effort.

Continuous Deployment

The final stage of a mature CI/CD pipeline is continuous deployment. Continuous deployment is an extension of continuous delivery and can refer to automating the release of a developer’s changes from the repository to production, where it is usable by customers.

CD addresses the problem of overloading operations teams with manual processes that slow down app delivery. It builds on the benefits of continuous delivery by automating the next stage in the pipeline.

In practice, continuous deployment means that a developer’s change to an application could go live within minutes of writing it (assuming it passes automated testing). This makes it much easier to continuously receive and incorporate user feedback. Taken together, all of these connected CI/CD practices make the deployment process less risky, whereby it’s easier to release changes to apps in small pieces, rather than all at once.

Continuous Deployment = CI/CDelivery + fully automated testing and deployment in Production environment.

However, because there is no manual gate at the stage of the pipeline before production, continuous deployment relies heavily on well-designed test automation. This means that continuous deployment can require a lot of upfront investment since automated tests will need to be written to accommodate a variety of testing and release stages in the CI/CD pipeline.

What is a DevOps platform?

Many teams start with a mix of tools that are hard to maintain and integrate. A DevOps platform consolidates these tools into a single application, enhancing collaboration, visibility, and development speed.

This platform approach is essential for modern software creation, security, release, and monitoring. It allows teams to iterate faster and innovate together, making it crucial for navigating the complexities of modern software development and fully realizing the benefits of DevOps.

Some DevOps platforms:

• Azure DevOps
• Jira Software stack
• GitLab
• GitHub (Actions)

DevOps Trends

Several key trends shaping DevOps evolution:

1. Increased Automation — GitOps: GitOps uses Git repositories as the single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and applications, enhancing deployment reliability, auditability, and version control.

• Version Control: Track changes and roll back when needed.
• Deployment Reliability: Reduces deployment faults and downtime.
• Auditability: Ensures visibility and auditability.

Popular tools like Flux and Argo CD enable continuous deployment for Kubernetes through Git repositories.

2. AI/ML Integration: Smarter decision-making powered by AI and machine learning will enhance areas like code review and tool selection.

3. DevOps Platforms: The adoption of comprehensive DevOps platforms will streamline workflows and improve collaboration.

4. Chaos engineering: involves deliberately inducing failures in a system to test its resilience and response, helping organizations build stronger systems.

• Simulated Failures: Introduce failures in controlled environments.
• Identify Weaknesses: Discover and address system weaknesses.
• Effective Recovery: Ensure recovery mechanisms work effectively.

Overall, DevOps will continue to evolve, driven by the need for faster, more reliable software delivery and improved collaboration between development and operations teams.