The importance of source control

While establishing a DevOps culture is the most important aspect of DevOps from a process perspective, as we saw in the previous chapter, it’s fair to say that source control is the most important technical aspect. It underpins all the other tools and techniques of a mature DevOps process and enables deployments, peer review, rollbacks, and automation as part of a CI/CD process. Let’s explore some of the advantages afforded by source control and the processes that build upon it.

Collaboration

DevOps is fundamentally a collaborative approach to software development, so effective collaboration is vital. Source control enables multiple developers to work on the same code base simultaneously while indicating when they could be overlapping or overwriting each other’s changes during the development phase. Changes are merged later, and when coupled with appropriate reviews, they allow for rapid development and fewer defects, since...