ABOUT DEVOPS

DevOps is more than just development and operations teams working together. It’s more than tools and practices. DevOps is a mindset, a cultural shift, where teams adopt new ways of working.

A DevOps culture means developers get closer to the user by gaining a better understanding of user requirements and needs. Operations teams get involved in the development process and add maintenance requirements and customer needs. It means adhering to the following key principles that help DevOps teams deliver applications and services at a faster pace and higher quality than organizations using the traditional software development model.

The word “DevOps” was coined in 2009 by Patrick Debois, who became one of its gurus. The term was formed by combining “development” and “operations,” which provides a starting point for understanding exactly what people typically mean when they say “DevOps.” Notably, DevOps isn’t a process or a technology or a standard. Many devotees refer to DevOps as a “culture”—a viewpoint that New Relic favors. We also use the term “DevOps movement” when talking about topics such as adoption rates and trends for the future, and “DevOps environment” to refer to an IT organization that has adopted a DevOps culture

Companies often talk about shifting to DevOps, hiring SREs, and becoming more agile, but how do these terms relate to one another?

Agile and Lean is how teams iterate, with short development cycles and fast feedback. Agile focuses on culture and is agnostic to which tools are used.

DevOps is how engineering organizations collaborate using cross-functional teams. DevOps starts with culture and drives toward tooling.

SRE (System Reliability Engineering) is how engineering organizations automate, entrusting highly scaled operations to people with a software engineering mindset. SRE starts with tooling and drives toward culture.

DevOps variants (such as “SecDevOps”) involves the insertion or addition of another organization/practice earlier in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), and the prevalence of these different types of DevOps speaks to the increasing integration of functions in modern organizations.