DevOps
DevOps is a way of working in which the people who build software share responsibility for running it, with automation that makes small change safe.
What is devops?
DevOps is a way of working in which the people who build software share responsibility for running it, with automation that makes small change safe.
Plain and technical
Traditionally one group wrote software and a different group ran it, which meant changes queued at the boundary and releases became large and risky. DevOps puts both responsibilities with the same people and invests in automation so that shipping small changes often is safer than shipping large ones rarely.
DevOps combines continuous integration, continuous delivery, infrastructure as code, automated testing, monitoring and blameless incident review into a single delivery model. Its outcomes are conventionally measured with the four DORA metrics (deployment frequency, change lead time, change failure rate and time to restore service), which are reported together because two describe speed and two describe stability.
What it looks like in practice
Nearby vocabulary
DevSecOps
DevSecOps is the practice of integrating security verification into the software delivery process rather than applying it as a separate review at the end.
Continuous delivery
Continuous delivery is the practice of keeping software in a state where any change that has passed verification could be released to production at any time.
Site reliability engineering
Site reliability engineering applies software engineering to operations, using reliability objectives and error budgets to balance stability and speed.
Platform engineering
Platform engineering is the discipline of building internal products that make it straightforward for product teams to build, ship and operate software.
How DevOpsArk handles devops
Articles on this subject
What is DevOps? A definition that survives contact with practice
What DevOps actually means, where the definition came from, what the lifecycle looks like in practice, and the common misreadings that turn it into a job title instead of a way of working.
DevOps automation: what to automate, in what order
A practical sequence for automating a delivery path, which step gives the most back first, which automation tends to be regretted, and how to tell when a stage is genuinely done.
More definitions
See these concepts in a running system
A 30-minute walkthrough against your own infrastructure rather than a slide about the theory.