A compound of development (Dev) and operations (Ops), DevOps is the union of people, process and technology to continually provide value to customers on their business objectives.

DevOps enables software development life cycle activities (SDLC) that are isolated like development, IT operations, quality engineering and security—to coordinate and collaborate to produce better, more reliable products in the optimized environment. By adopting a DevOps culture along with DevOps practices and tools, teams gain the ability to better respond to customer needs, increase confidence in the applications they build and achieve business goals faster.

DevOps speeds delivery of higher quality software by combining and automating the work of software development and IT operations teams.

DevOps outlines a software development process and an organizational culture shift that speeds the delivery of higher quality software by automating and integrating the efforts of development and IT operations teams – two groups that traditionally practiced separately from each other, or in silos.

In practice, the best DevOps processes and cultures extend beyond development and operations to incorporate inputs from all application stakeholders - including platform and infrastructure engineering, security, compliance, governance, risk management, line-of-business, end-users and customers - into the software development lifecycle.

DevOps represents the current state of the evolution of software delivery cycles during the past 2 decades, from giant application-wide code releases every several months or even years, to iterative smaller feature or functional updates released as frequently as every day or several times per day.

Ultimately, DevOps is about meeting software users’ ever-increasing demand for frequent, innovative new features and uninterrupted performance and availability.