What is Devops?

DevOps is the blending of tasks performed by a company's application development and systems operations teams. The term DevOps is being used in several ways. In its most broad meaning, DevOps is an operational philosophy that promotes better communication between development and operations as more elements of operations become programmable. In its most narrow interpretation, DevOps describes the part of an organization’s information technology (IT) team that creates and maintains infrastructure. The term may also be used to describe a culture that strategically looks at the entire software delivery chain, overseeing shared services and promoting the use of new development tools and best practices.  

The DevOps toolchain

Although marketers have jumped on the DevOps bandwagon, there is really no such thing as a “DevOps product.” There is only software that will help the development and operations team work together more efficiently and respond to changing requirements more flexibly. New software tools have sprung up to help organizations automate testing and create a more streamlined development and release pipeline. Such tools include GitHub for storing code, Puppet and Chef for configuration management, Nagios for monitoring how changes to code affect the environment and Splunk for operational intelligence.

The role of DevOps engineers

The role of DevOps engineer does not fall along one career track; professionals evolve into the position from a variety of backgrounds. DevOps is often said to be more of a philosophy or a collaborative IT culture rather than a strictly-defined job description or skill set. Because the area is so broad, DevOps positions may be more suited to IT generalists than specialists.