DevOps
Breaking the wall between people who write software and people who run it.
DevOps is a way of working that joins development (writing the software) and operations (running it in production) into one continuous effort. The name and the movement took off around 2009. Before, a common setup was that developers finished a feature and "threw it over the wall" to an operations team that had to install it, keep it alive and get woken up at 3 a.m. when it broke. Each side blamed the other.
DevOps says the same team should care about the whole life of the software, captured in the phrase "you build it, you run it". In practice that comes with habits and tools: CI/CD pipelines that test and deploy every change, infrastructure as code so servers are created from files instead of by hand, monitoring and alerts so problems are seen before customers report them, and blameless reviews after incidents to fix causes rather than find culprits.
It is mainly a culture and set of practices, but the word is also used as a job title: a DevOps engineer usually builds and maintains the pipelines, cloud infrastructure and monitoring the rest of the team relies on. Variations add other concerns to the loop, like DevSecOps, which builds security checks into every step instead of leaving them for the end.
Keep in mind
- Development and operations share responsibility for software in production.
- Built on automation: CI/CD, infrastructure as code, monitoring.
- Aims for small, frequent, safe changes and fast recovery from failures.
- It is a culture first; the job title came later.
