What DevOps is and why you should care

If you are constantly amazed (and a little alarmed) at how quickly businesses can release digital products, and the updates that go with them, you need to know more about DevOps. Netflix, the most popular streaming service company, deploys code thousands of times a day without a release team. Facebook has moved into a continuous release cycle and cut their releases from once every four weeks just three years ago to now bi-weekly deployments. Spotify, a popular music streaming service, has gone from bi-weekly sprint cycles to now allowing teams to deploy tens or hundreds of times a day—if and when—they choose to do so.

The good news is...you can define and tweak DevOps for what makes sense to your organization’s product delivery. It’s important to note that DevOps isn’t a department you establish, nor does it require an exclusive set of development tools to implement it. It’s an automation process you establish that becomes part of your culture. DevOps can be invisible.

In the simplest terms, DevOps is a mindset, one that eliminates walls between development and operations so software can be built, tested, and deployed faster without involving manual steps. Instead of functioning as separate departments, developers, QA testers, system admins, support staff, and end users work together as a unified team, sharing responsibility for the final product. The specific makeup of a DevOps team can vary across organizations and projects.

Despite the abundance of research and statistics already proving the benefits of DevOps, implementation remains a struggle for many companies. This white paper will provide a roadmap showing how to help overcome the most common roadblocks and put DevOps best practices to work.