Discovering DevOps

Too often, the word DevOps is passed around as a buzzword without an understanding of its meaning. Another unfortunate assumption is that you can simply tell a team of developers to do DevOps. Or, perhaps you can pay for a relevant training course or product, state that your company is now a DevOps company, and this will make it the case. This is all wrong.

Let’s start with defining DevOps before we go any further into the topic.

What is DevOps?

If you were to ask a group of 10 people to tell you what DevOps is, you’d most likely get 10 different answers (maybe more). Some of the definitions may include implementing infrastructure as code, feature flags, automation, smaller deployments, or Agile planning, among other things.

None of these is wrong per se because DevOps can involve all these practices and more, but DevOps itself is a fundamentally simple idea.

One of my favorite definitions of DevOps is that given by Microsoft’s...