What is DevOps?

The term “DevOps” describes a dynamic approach in which software development and IT operations work closely together to accelerate the delivery, improvement, and deployment of products. A successful DevOps transformation involves not only specific methods and tools, but above all a cultural shift within the company toward what is known as a DevOps culture.

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DevOps Is Teamwork: Skillful Integration

The core idea behind a DevOps culture is that teamwork and shared responsibilities lead to better results. Through close collaboration and extensive automation, teams become more efficient and faster, and can expect higher customer satisfaction as product quality noticeably improves. At the same time, every team member is involved to some extent in all phases of the product lifecycle. For example, developers are not solely responsible for developing new features, but also for the impact their changes have on the stability and performance of the live environment. Conversely, IT operations staff are involved in the planning and development phases to ensure governance, security, and compliance from the outset.

Many teams use dedicated DevOps tools to make their work transparent and thereby facilitate smoother collaboration. The more visible individual priorities, workflows, and responsibilities are, the more seamlessly the various areas can be integrated. That’s why shared metrics are also valuable points of connection. Beyond Dev and Ops, quality assurance and, as needed, other specialized departments are often integrated into the resulting framework.

DevOps is a journey: Every step counts

The DevOps approach combines agile principles, lean concepts, and extensive automation measures with an incremental development process. This powerful combination results in short release cycles, which enable teams to plan more effectively and assess risks more accurately. Changes in requirements are also implemented much more quickly thanks to these short intervals. Continual improvement has just as much of a place in this dynamic environment as continuous integration and continuous delivery—in other words, with DevOps, everything is in flux. Code changes are integrated regularly, updates are deployed continuously, and processes are constantly improved. In a DevOps culture, there is always something that can be—and will be—further optimized.

DevOps Is About Having the Courage to Make Mistakes: A Look Back at Its History

When looking for the origins of DevOps, there are four names you simply can’t ignore: Patrick Debois and Andrew Shafer, as well as John Allspaw and Paul Hammond. At an agile conference in Toronto in 2008, there was exactly one attendee at Andrew Shafer’s impromptu discussion session titled “Agile Infrastructure”: Belgian consultant and project manager Patrick Debois, who had long been frustrated by the rigid, opaque IT structures in his organization. The lively discussion between the two initially gave rise to a special interest group for agile system administration.

About a year later, the issue of siloed, poorly communicating IT departments once again took center stage at an international conference. At the 2009 O’Reilly Velocity Conference, Flickr employees John Allspaw and Paul Hammond presented their collaboration methods for Dev and Ops. In addition to shared metrics and responsibilities, as well as mutual respect, they particularly emphasized the need for change—despite the fact that changes would always pose a risk to live operations. The approach they presented was therefore designed to enable change while minimizing existing risk as much as possible. Debois, who was unable to attend the conference himself, took the inspiring presentation as an opportunity to host his own conference in Ghent: DevOpsDays, which gave the DevOps approach its name.

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