“Dev” is used as shorthand for developers in particular, but really in practice it is even wider and means “all the people involved in developing the product,” which can include Product, QA, and other kinds of disciplines.ĭevOps has strong affinities with Agile and Lean approaches. Those techniques can range from using source control to testing to participating in an Agile development process.įor this purpose, “DevOps” doesn’t differentiate between different sysadmin sub-disciplines – “Ops” is a blanket term for systems engineers, system administrators, operations staff, release engineers, DBAs, network engineers, security professionals, and various other subdisciplines and job titles. I believe that you can define DevOps more practically asĭevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support.Ī primary corollary to this is that part of the major change in practice from previous methods isĭevOps is also characterized by operations staff making use many of the same techniques as developers for their systems work. That’s good and meaty, but it may be a little too esoteric and specific to Internet startup types. One definition Jez Humble proposed to me is that DevOps is “a cross-disciplinary community of practice dedicated to the study of building, evolving and operating rapidly-changing resilient systems at scale.” The second is a much expanded understanding of the value of collaboration between development and operations staff throughout all stages of the development lifecycle when creating and operating a service, and how important operations has become in our increasingly service-oriented world (cf. The first was also called “agile infrastructure” or “agile operations” it sprang from applying Agile and Lean approaches to operations work. Definition of DevOpsĭevOps is a new term emerging from the collision of two major related trends. Like “Quality” or “Agile,” DevOps is a large enough concept that it requires some nuance to fully understand. Here’s my take on how DevOps can be usefully defined I propose this definition as a standard framework to more clearly discuss the various areas DevOps covers. Like any new and popular term, people may have confused and sometimes contradictory impressions of what it is. DevOps is a term for a group of concepts that, while not all new, have catalyzed into a movement and are rapidly spreading throughout the technical community.

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