The Role of DevOps

Three practices of DevOps

In this lesson, we’ll learn about how companies improve their chances of success when releasing code into production. Companies tackle the three issues mentioned previously with one single approach that combines the skills of both software development and IT operations. The name for this approach is DevOps, for development and operations. The history and practice of DevOps goes back to at least 2008, when Patrick Debois presented a talk called “Agile Infrastructure and Operations” in Toronto.

The aim of DevOps is to reduce the time it takes to build and release changes into the system. DevOps does this by encouraging teams to create smaller release packages, release them more often, and automate as much of the process as possible to reduce the chances of variability.

Three practices cover the role of DevOps in deploying an application:

• Continuous integration
• Continuous delivery
• Continuous deployment

They form a kind of ladder of DevOps maturity or advancement. Each rung of that ladder has a set of goals as well as a set of costs or challenges.