DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating together to collaborate and communicate while automating the process of software delivery.

DevOps is a practice that emphasizes that both software developers and other information-technology (IT) professionals. The primary goal of DevOps is to establish a culture and environment where building, testing, and releasing software happens rapidly, frequently, and more reliably.

Now if you are wondering whether DevOps is just another trend in the IT sector, you are probably wrong. Most IT companies are able to quickly respond to shifting customer demands to deliver better customer experience and better business results by implementing DevOps into their system.

DevOps is an approach based on lean and agile principles in which business owners and the development, operations, and quality assurance departments collaborate to deliver software in a continuous manner that enables the business to more quickly seize market opportunities and reduce the time to include customer feedback. Faster delivery cycles enable organizations to provide innovative solutions by quickly delivering new capabilities and reducing the time they spend waiting for feedback.

DevOps is a new term emerging from the collision of two major related trends viz agile system administration and understanding of the value of collaboration between development and operations staff throughout all stages of the development lifecycle. Operations have become extremely important in our increasingly service-oriented world.

It is important to treat delivery as a pipeline process. You need to use practices like lean value stream analysis to understand the process and start with the point where code is checked in to the point where customers receive benefit. This helps companies identify barriers to faster delivery. A more clear view starts with the point where ideas or incidents are identified and flows through customer experience.

As per Jez Humble, a renowned author, ‘DevOps is a cross-disciplinary community of practice dedicated to the study of building, evolving and operating rapidly-changing resilient systems at scale.’ At the crux of it, Ops is a collective term for systems engineers, system administrators, operations staff, release engineers, DBAs, network engineers, security professionals, and various other sub disciplines. Dev is used as shorthand for developers in particular, which basically means “each one involved in developing the product.

DevOps provides a proven set of practices that enable organizations to deliver applications quickly to better connect with customers; all this with reduced risk. Faster and better feedback enables organizations to cut waste, reduce cost, and improve customer experiences.

Whenever an organization adopts a new technology or approach, the adoption has to root from a business need. To implement DevOps, you must understand the business need for it. DevOps applies agile and lean principles across the entire software supply chain. It enables a business to maximize the speed of its delivery of a product or service, from initial idea to production release to customer feedback to enhancements based on that feedback

Because DevOps improves the way that a business delivers value to its customers, suppliers, and partners, it’s an essential business process, not just an IT capability. DevOps provides significant return on investment in these two areas: