A culture and set of practices that unite software development and IT operations to deliver software faster and more reliably.
Traditionally, developers wrote code and handed it to a separate operations team to deploy and run, which often caused friction and slow releases. DevOps breaks down that wall by making teams share responsibility for building, deploying, and operating software.
Key practices include CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, automated testing, monitoring and observability, and blameless post-incident reviews. Tools such as Git, Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform are common, but DevOps is ultimately about collaboration and fast feedback, not any specific tool. Related ideas include DevSecOps, which builds security into every stage, and site reliability engineering, which applies software engineering methods to operations problems.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery or Deployment: practices that automatically build, test, and release code changes.
DORA MetricsFour measures of software delivery performance: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service.
Developer ExperienceHow easy, efficient, and pleasant it is for software developers to do their work with a given set of tools, processes, and platforms.
DockerA popular platform for building, sharing, and running applications inside containers.
Infrastructure as CodeManaging and provisioning servers, networks, and cloud resources through machine-readable configuration files instead of manual setup.
ObservabilityThe ability to understand what is happening inside a software system by examining the data it produces, such as logs, metrics, and traces.
Platform EngineeringThe practice of building an internal developer platform that gives software teams self-service tools to build, deploy, and run applications.
Site Reliability EngineeringAn approach, known as SRE, that applies software engineering to operations to keep systems reliable, scalable, and efficient.
UptimeThe percentage of time a system, website, or service is operational and available to users.
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