# DevOps

> Breaking the wall between people who write software and people who run it.

- Level: Intermediate
- Topics: Software
- URL: https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/devops/
- In Spanish: [DevOps](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/es/devops/)

**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.

## An analogy

Like a restaurant where the cooks also see the dining room. If a dish keeps coming back cold, they find out that night and fix it, instead of reading a complaint from a separate department a month later.

## 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.

## Go deeper

- [What is DevOps? (AWS)](https://aws.amazon.com/devops/what-is-devops/)
- [DevOps on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps)

## Related terms

- [CI/CD](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/ci-cd/): Automation that builds, tests and ships every code change, so releases become routine.
- [Infrastructure as code](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/infrastructure-as-code/): Describing servers, networks and databases in files instead of clicking.
- [Server](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/server/): A computer whose job is to answer requests from other computers, all day, every day.
- [Cloud computing](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/cloud-computing/): Renting computers over the internet instead of buying your own.